The mobile gaming industry is relatively embryonic. It's at an early stage of evolution where fundamental strategies for success are coarsely defined. Its clear dissimilarity from other rising markets is that it's a marriage of two extremely successful industries. Established digital games companies are increasingly recognizing the potential of mobile, and are making efforts to muscle in on the action. Partnerships between mobile operators, gaming companies, and device manufacturers are beginning to emerge. With an estimated 107-million active wireless gamers generating nearly $5-billion USD in service revenues by 2006, the global market for wireless gaming is poised for explosive growth.

But who's going to be playing these games? Games companies are focusing their strategy on teens. According to research, end users of existing mobile consoles such as Game Boy Advance are primarily teens. On the whole, both the mobile and digital games industries have much broader demographics. The popularity of both digital games and mobile phones represents a healthy prospect in attracting segments from both industries into the convergence of mobile wireless gaming.

There's no doubt that teenagers seem to have the most free time. They are definitely inured to gaming on other platforms, and also display a, sometimes unhealthy, obsession with fashion, friends, and entertainment. This habitual teenage behavior is what drives their spending. From a teenage perspective, bandwidth will be burned playing mobile games on their way to school. If they can get away with it, the more addictive games will be used in the classroom as well. They are likely to increase the time spent playing games that involve incentives.

The most promising aspect of this group is their generally enthusiastic attitude toward new technologies, especially when related to entertainment and communications. During the teenage years, behavior is centered on feeling you belong to a community and nowadays, technology doesn't restrict this to physical presences in the immediate area. Multiplayer games will be a huge "win-win" for this target group.

From a marketing perspective, targeting teens will be crucial to driving the initial uptake of wireless gaming. The specific features of the youth market suggest that younger people will be the first to adopt any new technology. Marketing efforts aimed at kids initiated the recent upsurge in popularity of all video games, but are now targeting older users as well for their income expenditure. To make a long story short, gaming companies know their target better than start-ups, better than mobile operators, and they've spent many hours of segmenting and planning on this diverse age group of teens and generation Y. It's a big market out there and there are some hefty revenues to be generated, but don't fool yourself that the money is there now.

Current technologies do not allow for the sophistication levels needed to keep users enthralled. Mobile gamers are currently generation Ys who can relate to the simplicity of the games because they grew up with the first ones. I call them the "Take a trip down memory lane" gamers.

This level of gaming isn't exciting enough for teenagers who've lived with 32-bit sound and graphics most of their lives from consoles and PC games. However, when the industry and marketplace introduce a device and infrastructure akin to early Doom days, that's when you'll start seeing a twinkle in their eyes. Multiplayer games will be a huge market, just as they now are on wired broadband connections.

Also, multiplayer and multiplatform games, although quirky right now, will not only be huge for the gaming industry, but for the advertising industry. Electronic Arts and Nokia have already given birth to a game environment that requires you to interact with other media such as television and even fax machines to keep you involved in the game. Just imagine that you have to watch a TV ad that's on at a certain time or look out for ads on the tube to get the password to unlock the next level. Add this to a budget for incentives on winning the game. Now if that isn't a call to action I don't know what is. I'll be bringing you more on this in a future installment.

Mobile Gaming in Europe and Beyond

by Tom Hume

There's little doubt that entertainment content will be a principal source of traffic for operators in the wireless space over the next few years. Much of NTT DoCoMo's highly successful i-mode service was concentrated on entertainment content, and in light of the current European mania for logos and ringtones, it seems reasonable to conclude that this preference will travel beyond Japan.

Here in the UK, we're a little behind our Japanese counterparts, and the opportunities for deploying mass-market games are currently limited: SMS, WAP, native applications, or Java-based apps.

As a rule of thumb, the wider the reach a technology has, the more limited it is. This is very natural ­ the older and more mature technologies (such as SMS) are understood well enough to have solid billing models and cheap enough to implement so that they've become standard features in phones. Meanwhile, more modern, flexible technologies such as WAP are still proving themselves. Understanding this is key to understanding entertainment opportunities: the reach of your application will be inversely proportional to the quality of its user experience.

SMS is everywhere. It's standard in just about every mobile phone out there today, it's well-understood (by end users, particularly in the more youthful demographics, as well as by the mobile operators), and it's about as limited as an interactive technology can be. If you can conceive of a compelling game that involves text-only messaging, then SMS is absolutely perfect. While SMS can be used to deliver ringtones and graphics, you can't rely on end users having phones that support these extensions to the SMS standards, nor can you "detect" such phones automatically...

After SMS, WAP is the next most deployed technology on our list ­ but the figures reveal a huge gap (in users) between the two. By the end of 2000, only 1.6% of Western Europeans owned WAP phones. At the same time, about 50% of the same sample were capable of sending and receiving text messages. Nevertheless WAP is a ratified, open standard that has been adopted and supported by every major phone manufacturer out there ­ and no comparable alternative currently exists within Europe.

It allows for full two-way interactivity, so WAP games tend to be leaps ahead of their SMS equivalents, with simple graphics and complex turn-based game play. The better games tend to be those that concentrate on the strengths of the mobile phone ­ connectivity and constant availability ­ rather than trying to re-create the experience of console games through impressive graphics. For good examples, take a look at Alien Fish Exchange, or Zombie Jungle Warfare.

Native applications ­ that is, those written directly for the phone hardware ­ are rare. This is because such applications tend to be difficult to develop and deploy to large numbers of users, and because underlying hardware varies greatly between phones. Therefore it's unlikely that an application developed for one brand of phone will work on another. Nevertheless, with the rise of SIM Application Toolkit such applications are feasible for third parties (outside of handset manufacturers) to develop.

Finally, we arrive at Java applications. Once touted as a Microsoft-killing "write once, run anywhere" language, Java has since matured into a solid solution for developing server-side Web applications, and in recent years has returned to its roots as a language for programming consumer devices. A large number of handset manufacturers (including the Symbian joint venture) are supporting Java in one form or another as a technology for enabling interactive applications on mobile phones.

NTT DoCoMo is characteristically ahead of the game, with over 7-million phones sold that support their i-Appli Java implementation. With the release of their 9210 Communicator earlier this year, Nokia brought support for Java applications to Europe ­ an important step for themselves and Symbian, which provides their EPOC OS (with Java support) for the 9210.

While the variety of available phones, each with a slightly differing form factor and feature-set, might prevent true "write once, run anywhere" development, properly designed applications will be able to divorce UI code from the guts of an application, speeding development time and easing the process of porting to multiple handsets. The vast number of skilled Java developers currently available also makes the language attractive to content providers.

So what else can we expect to see in Europe over the next 12 months that will speed the arrival of compelling mobile entertainment? Color screens should start to appear (they've been available in Japan for quite some time now), bringing a surprising improvement to the quality of the end-user experience. Improvements in phone networks (notably, the move to an always-on network like GPRS, which allows for per-packet billing) will lead to games that are instantly available and can communicate cheaply and efficiently with other players, or with a central server ­ opening up multiplayer possibilities. Billing systems should also improve, allowing games providers to realize revenue from their properties in a more coherent manner than is possible today. And finally, as wireless moves from being a technology play into becoming a medium in its own right, expect to see big-name brands appearing on your phone display.

Already, companies such as Riot-E are purchasing mobile rights to household names (e.g., Marvel Comics, Bridget Jones's Diary, and Lord of the Rings) with a view to using them for mobile gaming. Combine that with the interest that the console games industry is displaying in mobile opportunities, and it's clear that the next few years are going to be very interesting indeed…