There’s a fair bit of news to come out of the Develop 08 conference on mobile games, and the talks and panels are discussed below. Some interesting notes to come out so far include that Nokia (NYSE: NOK) is looking into concepts where it uses the same assets for Xbox Live Arcade or PlayStation online, which would be an unexpected direction for the company. Glu (NSDQ: GLUU) noted that preloading games on handsets is a big winner, with conversion rates of between eight and 30 percent from preloading demos on handsets.
Aki Jarvilehto, Global Head of Business Development and Innovation for Nokia, gave the keynote — which was largely a take on how Nokia views the mobile game industry. He talked up the new technology which Nokia will be pushing, including cross-platform capability, touch-screens, accelerometers and so on, and said the biggest potential for mainstream innovation was from GPS reports DevelopMag. Other trends he sees are a change towards “valuing better production values in games” (at last) and more opportunities for developers to self-publish their games. He also described the six segments Nokia breaks gamers into: “Core Gamer (
Looking at those figures, 30% of users are playing games and only 2.2% are buying. I think the trend away from paying for digital goods is something that would be very difficult to fight. It would be better for the mobile game industry to focus more heavily on monetizing freely distributed games. Ad revenue comes to mind, but thinking outside the box should find other options. I also tend to think eventually there will be a trend toward game integration with mobile web browsing, rather than as a separate app.
Intelligent now have mobile phones, more and more games.