Mobile game publishers and their carrier partners are hoping to lure newbies by giving away everything from 30-second game demos to a Volkswagen Beetle. Whether they’re succeeding, though, is far from certain.
Wireless gaming continues to struggle to expand past the “golden nickel”-the 5% of mobile users who download and play games on their phones. Figures from M:Metrics, in fact, indicate roughly 3.2% of U.S. subscribers downloaded a game in an average recent month, down slightly from a monthly average of 3.3% a year ago.
While exact figures are difficult to come by (most publishers are privately held), it appears all but a few publishers have yet to attain profitability. Glu Mobile Inc., which is often cited as one of the three largest players in the field, recently reported a first-quarter net loss of $764,000. The company, which went public a few months ago, reported a substantial improvement compared with last year, when it suffered a $3.5 million net loss in the first quarter. But the announcement also underscored the fact that mobile gaming has yet to reach mass-market consumers.
Taking first-time users
by the hand
There is, of course, no shortage of barriers when it comes to uptake of mobile games. Most handsets make for lousy game controllers. Some titles can cost $12 or more for unlimited use, requiring a user to pay about one-fourth of an average monthly wireless bill for a single game. And carrier decks continue to serve as nightmarish virtual shopping malls for even tech-savvy consumers.
“It’s still complicated to find a game on a handset, and to download a game on a handset,” Leighton Webb, I-play’s senior VP for content strategy and licensing, said at GDC Mobile in San Francisco earlier this year. “And once I’ve downloaded it, where did it go?”
So game-makers and network operators are working harder than ever to take first-timers by the hand and walk them into the wireless gaming arena. Carriers are beginning to use content-search programs to allow users to find specific titles quickly instead of clicking through screen after screen. Publishers are teaming with brands outside of wireless on cross-platform promotional efforts, and are teasing users with pre-loaded games that can be played free for a few moments.
The idea, according to Namco Networks VP Scott Rubin, isn’t to make a one-off sale of the pre-loaded title. Instead, it’s to expose consumers to the entire wireless gaming environment and get them accustomed to playing on their phones.
Free or not to be
Namco and its carrier partners offer free demos of a few high-profile titles such as Pac-Man, and the publisher worked with Sprint Nextel Corp. to promote its games with a sweepstakes that included the Beetle giveaway. But while a little taste can be a good thing, offering too much content on the house can be costly, he warned.
“Free demos are a double-edged sword; we need to think very carefully about it,” Rubin explained. “The games that are being demoed, that are free and pre-loaded, need to be mass-market games. Not every game is like that. . When people see it, they need to get wowed by it. We don’t want to disappoint people with a free download.”
A handful of game distributors are going one step further with the demo model, using advertising revenues to offer free titles by delivering marketing messages between gaming sessions. Greystripe, a San Francisco-based startup, offers more than 800 free mobile games via the online and mobile portal GameJump.com. The outfit claims to have delivered 7 million downloads since its launch last year, and last week it pocketed $8.9 million in a second round of funding led by The Walt Disney Co.’s venture-capital arm.
Other players in the ad-supported mobile gaming space include Exit Games and Hovr Inc.
Backers of the strategy claim ad revenues create a distribution channel for smaller publishers and developers that lack the muscle to find space on carrier decks or online storefronts such as Jamster.com. But established players have questioned the strategy of offering free titles as mobile gaming struggles to evolve from a niche market into the mainstream. The mobile game market may be slogging along, Rubin said, but giving away games won’t help the market in the long term.
“I kind of thought the market would be a little bit further along by now,” Rubin said. “(But) we’ve trained consumers to understand that the intellectual property (of mobile games) has a value, and we don’t want them to think that games on phones should be free.
“I think the five or 10 top publishers and all the carriers need to get together and figure out how to educate consumers more, and get them to know that games are available and how to find them on a phone,” Rubin continued. “Then we need to make sure their experience is a positive one, and get them to buy again.”
