Mobile Gaming – the titanic shift

The industry is undergoing a titanic shift, factors like the ease of publishing to the App Store, the extremely low cost to become a developer, the growth of Freemium games (games given away for free with revenues coming from alternative sources) and the rise of the female gamers (53% of mobile gamers are female) are rewriting the rules.

Anywhere, any-time, high quality gaming, that fits nicely in our pocket, is yours to have .  The mobile entertainment industry was worth $33 billion last year, which is due in part to the success of smartphones like the iPhone and the plethora of Android devices like the HTC Thunderbolt.  These high powered computers were just waiting for people to turn them into gaming consoles.

An interesting infographic by Geekaphone:

 

 

Customer Engagement, Gamification & Social Games – 2

In my last blog I referred to  the term “Gamification” as use of game design techniques in  non-game applications.This gamification exploits a humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in gaming.

But let’s get our attention back to actual gaming applications like “Mafia wars” and to my very own “Seduction“.. had to mention it ..can’t forget my baby ;).

In terms of genre,social media games are not much different from other entertainment mediums like movies  ( “Reservoir Dogs” or “When Harry Met Sally” ).The difference is that most of the social media games focus on a very limited set of genre and lack creativity in publishing story lines that cater to adults.

Most of them seem to be either fighting with aliens or plowing neighbors patch of fallow land ( “Farmville” ).I have nothing against these genres.They are very successful and have been designed to engage gamer’s attention for a long time.

But the market segment served by these genres is limited.Social media gaming industry is still new and hence we are witnessing this explosive growth.There is a very interesting statistics that I found here:

These numbers are impressive but there is still a huge untapped casual gaming market.A well chosen genre with excellent delivery of gaming experience  can attract lots of new gamers from under served market segments.

Important point to note in above statistics is that “more women play social network games” compared to men.Traditionally in console gaming industry,men dominated the market and still do,but more women play social media games.

“Seduction” is a humble effort to fix this anomaly 😉