Mobile
MOBILE – A year in Mobile. Free mobile games!
Last modified on 2008-03-06 11:18:23 GMT. 2 comments. Top.
Free mobile games? User generated mobile content? Mobile advertising? Everyone talks about it, but where is it… one year later.
(The games included in this post were an experiment of user-generated Flash Lite content produced for www.playyoo.com. Read more about it in the post “USER EXPERIENCE – Building casual games for the Mobile” )
At the beginning of 2007 I ventured in the world of Mobile with both feet. At the time this world was new to me so I spent a great deal of time researching the industry, crawling the web for facts and figures that would give me a realistic perspective of both business opportunities and technology readiness. I even set up a blog, where I would post daily article and blog-entries I ran across specifically dealing with mobile casual games, mobile advertising, mobile social networks and alike.
As my new challenge was to help launch a new web2mobile service focusing on mobile casual games, free to the user and backed by a advertising model, I was very keen to find out about the potential revenues and channels that we could exploit in the short-to-medium term. I distinctly remember seeing incredible, unbelievable amazing numbers that would make any MBA drool for days, and at first I chunked it up to a wave of marketing hype, but as the months wore on this chatter about billions of dollars of expected advertising spend, billions of handsets in the hands of people not bothered by ads, web enabled applications and services ready for mobile, I started to salivate as well.
Putting together a REALISTIC business plan was both the worlds simplest exercise and my biggest nightmare, as it was easy to come up with documented figures and expectations, from credible sources, that would support incredible numbers and growth rates, but it was almost impossible to find any true, real, valid instance where these numbers or even their shadows could validate a spec of reality. Everyone was talking about it… but it did not exist!
To make matters worse, when I started to dissect the distribution channels and the available technology I came to the quick realization that the mobile world from the perspective of the “applications and services” developers, was in the primary fantasy phase that exists at the start of any new technology generational leap-forward, where most of the business talk was well crafted “predictions” that fueled the speculators and venture capital community, which usually get the first cut, without really producing sustainable products or services, but always light the first fires for others to follow… (mmm, I thought to myself, I remember something like this in the early 80′s, do you?) OK, I thought to myself at the time, I can live with that, after all I was working for speculators in the venture capital community, and they certainly have a key role… and my Mobile project proceeded as expected, shipped reasonably on schedule and has displayed moderate success in a number of instances. I am no longer on the project.
Almost exactly a year later, I decided to conduct a little assessment, if for no other reason, to give myself a realistic retrospective and extract some “lessons learned”.
1. The business hype is still there and flourishing. In late 2006 analyst were predicting 2007 to be the launching point for many-billion dollar mobile advertising industry to finally take off, today those analyst are saying the same exact things they were in 2006 with updated dates and numbers, all pointing very strongly to 2008. The future presents incredible business opportunities, bigger, better and with a much wider scope than the Internet ever did at its launching point… it will happen… tomorrow.
2. The mobile networks are still holding the reigns tightly. As the mobile carriers are making many-billion dollars with simple telephony service, with no end in site and with even more revenues on the horizon, with the exception of a small few, are not really interested in sharing their user base to services that might threaten their monopoly… and why should they. In the EU the market is still fragmented, Italy is an incredible example of a monopoly no one dares talk about… Ad-serving services are struggling both with channels and technology. The MMS technology after countless years and investments is no where, and apparently none of the players have figured out how to get along. Archaic SMS is still the leading technology… And new markets (Easter Europe) are a closely guarded secret, not allowed to compete with the big boys. And still today very few carriers are offering a monthly access fee to the Internet… why? (greed, comes to mind).
3. Handsets are the worst industry disaster to survive in suicide mode I have ever seen (I have only been around since the Lisa and the days of DOS). Some figures show that there are over 100 new hand sets introduced to the market… per day. With little to no standards, and the existing standards cannibalized by their own creators, with operating systems that make you wonder what planet they were intended for, with devices that leapfrog each other, forward and backwards, enough to make any application developers head spin. Where a side industry has evolved just to tell you what will and will not work on your device. Where ease of use and usability is still a fantasy, where only a hand full of manufacturers have taken the perspective and interest of the users and their experience on the device as primary, where Apple once again has no competition, at all (thank god for small favors), and where no one listens to the millions of handset owners screaming for a better world.
4. Developers for mobile applications are flourishing. But they feel like they are light years ahead of their markets and sometimes their users (inevitably true, thanks to mobile carriers and handset manufacturers). There are fantastic mobile applications, mobile social networks, instances of really cool and usefully mobile services are scattered seemingly everywhere, from park-and-pay with your mobile in Croatia to user-generated casual game services, to business critical applications implemented in the banking and brokerage industries. Very successful web services are adding extremely successful mobile functionality that change the way people approach daily tasks, entertainment and the acquisition of information. Web2mobile services that reinvent the way people speak with each other. Fantastic new innovations seem to crop up daily and not just from the usual places and the usual suspects… but only a handful of people are really using these new tools and even fewer are generating any significant revenues.
5. A year later… little has changed, but it’s all about to explode. The business opportunities are really there, waiting for the right time, not just to mature, but to explode. A very wise business investor gave me the “not to early & not to late” lecture last year, and in this case it could not be more true. Get the timing right on this mobile thing, and incredible things WILL happen. There are better business opportunities simply because the mobile carriers are maturing (slowly), the handset manufacturers are maturing (slooowly), the technology is mature and proving itself already in small spaces, and the user communities are really itching to go… so there is no better time than the present… and this is VERY exiting! The only trick is to know when and where the present really is!
MOBILE – Building casual games for the Mobile
Last modified on 2008-03-06 11:19:49 GMT. 1 comment. Top.
More fun than humans should be allowed to have! See these games and more at http://www.playyoo.com/games.html
Last year I participated in the evolution of a great new technology adventure which recently launched a new web service: www.playyoo.com
This project created a small startup in Lugano, Switzerland that launched a one of a kind Web2Mobile service featuring user-generated casual games for the mobile. In essence the free service wraps a social network around building silly little Flash Lite games people can create and download to their mobile phones. These ore not complex, strategic, super-duper spectacular computer games, these are casual games people play while waiting for the subway, or while taking a work break and having coffee, or while waiting for the next job interview in the lobby of some new start-up. Nothing complicated, the logic of these games usually is very simple, the good ones are very addictive, and they are very quick to make with the new Adobe technology Flash Lite. Additionally for people who are not technical at all, and think Flash Lite is indispensable in the dark, the super-geeks at Playyoo invented a Game Creator that features pre-built templates to well known games (Tic-Tack-Toe, Memory, Snake and alike) so that even someone like me can drop in a couple of graphics, press a few buttons and presto! it be a mobile game.
Having recently complete my assignment with the Playyoo Project, I was finally asked to have some real fun (yes, you were all a great big pain in the ass) and build a few games with the Game Creator, and I have to admit the games are really corny, but I had great fun building them.
After a simple registration process, you can start building games right away, just go to the “Create” page:
Select the game type that you would like to build:
And then just load the graphics, change the game parameters to your liking and press the “Publish it!” button
And thats it! You just created a mobile game for the whole world to download to their phone… pretty cool if you ask me!
Since the good people at Playyoo were actually paying me money to build these games (and no, they are not paying me to write this blog – although they might sue me when they read it) I though I would experiment a little to see how the “community” of subscribers world react to different themes. As it turns out the two tried and true subjects that the whole world responds to, held true to form and the two magical themes are SEX and MOVIE START GOSSIP… the more the technology changes the more the perversions stay the same.
I did make a methodical attempt at discovering the bounds of geek perversions, I tried popular cartooned themed games such as Spongebob, but the response was less than cold. Then being around Christmas I tried more holiday themed games, with about the same response as the first. I then attempted to tap into the age-old technology rivalry between Mac & Windows, again nothing. Then I tried globally renowned sports legends, such as Maradona (for you Americans that means soccer) and still no go… I tried the political approach and I created a Memory game featuring Presidents Bush entire cabinet, still no go… I even tried Rock greats, but I guess no one cares about Manson and Rammstein, or no one remembers who they are and I am just showing my age…
So then I started to dare, and created several Christmas themed games featuring scantly dresses girls, and finally the wheels started to creek in motion. I then decided to pull all the stops and created games like “Elvira – Mistress of the Dark”, “Cigar Woman”, Vintage Cigar Pin-ups”, “Babe Ball” and “Tic-Tac-Ooh” and finally the response was immediate.
I did take it one step further… no, no hard-core, I decided to tap into the great world of Google Trends. I figured if I could make a daily game that featured the hottest topic people were looking for the most on the world wide Web and combined it with some sexual connotations, counting on the premise that people wanted to have the latest hot topic and babes, I would have a winning combination. And so it was. The most downloaded games in my series of silly mobile games are: “Tata”, “Diablo Cody”, the “Britney Booze Game” and “UFO in Texas”.
These mobile games have the life span of a mosquito, people download them today because the topic is in the news, the girls are beautiful and they can show off to their friend how hip and cool they really are… and tomorrow they are deleted! Now apart the fact that in this experiment I probably broke every known copywrite law, and couple that with the fact that at some point Playyoo’s business model, as most, will be driven by advertising, the prospect of these games in millions of pockets on a daily basis leaves you mouth watering for… co-branding and venture capital!?
Only time will tell…
Many thanks to David Mantrip for his continued support and to Stowe Boyd & Janne Aalto for pointing out the co-marketing opportunities.
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