While the major consoles draw much of the attention in the games industry the mobile market is gearing up to capture masses of players, many of whom do not fall into the hardcore gamer category.
A report from Juniper Research predicts that mobile games will push past ringtones as the most popular mobile phone download, and end-user mobile phone revenue will top $A11.2 billion by 2009. With growth in India and Asia to set to grow exponentially from 10 to 40 million users in 2009.
Financial experts within the mobile industry agree that we’re coming up to a major period of expansion in a relatively untapped area, with Australia “punching above its weight” with some of the worlds most successful developers.
Australia has a thriving mobile development community with world leading developers such as Firemint and Iron Monkey pushing the capabilities of mobile phones to the next level. A relatively new player in mobile game development – Moket – launched its first game last week and it plans to have three titles available by the end of the year, with an online distribution model and more titles to follow. The Brisbane based developer was started in 2005 by web game developer Dale Rankin.
Dale was getting by making web games, when he came across an astounding piece of information that there were already 50 million mobile phones in Japan running flash and waiting for developers to come up with applications. With such a large user base it seemed obvious to Mr Rankin that sooner or later people might want something more interesting to do than SMS.
Moket focuses on Flash Light, saying it has unique advantages that will make it popular in the casual end of mobile gaming. Also the low development time associated with flash allows applications to be developed much more rapidly.
Our games are much easier to make than more resource-intensive titles built with Java or C+ software. We can put a good, entertaining game together using as little as 20 per cent of the time required when compared to other approaches and so it is possible to deliver more games to the market and make them cheaper.
One could speculate that the growth in mobile gaming could be enough to dwarf the console market user base, but the benefits are that more and more gaming is becoming a part of life across the world as the barriers to entry are lowered in both cost and useability. Which is undoubtedly positive for the industry as a whole.