Consumers Complain They Can't Find Mobile Games
One of the big concerns to emerge out of the Mobile Gaming Forum held the last couple of days in London was how to reach consumers. In a consumer panel of four gamers — ranging from hardcore to casual — two complained that they had a hard time finding games.
May Lin, who plays games on her Xbox and her PC and who plays mobile games to kill time, said that she had noticed that mobile games weren
The consumers' comments don't come as a surprise since most mobile operators have not done a good job at facilitating easy mobile content discovery. The easy answer to the problem is well executed mobile search, but the devil is in the details and that is why everyone from Vodafone to T-Mobile is experimenting with different strategies and technology partners. Yahoo's Go is a step in the righ direction, but when an on-device portal is only available for mostly high-end handsets the average gamer still won't have the tools to find the games they love.
Full disclosure, I am VP Marketing @ AdMob.
Prior to AdMob, I was SVP Marketing at Digital Chocolate. The lions share of the games industry's revenue comes via mobile operators. The operators control their channel and promote and display games to their own interest. The games companies are set up to sell through the operators and then complain that the operators are inflexible and don't promote their content enough.
*So do something about it!* Marketing and commerce tools are robust enough for games and apps publishers to market and sell directly to consumers. There are third parties who provide turnkey vending machines. If you want your games promoted, then promote them.
You can still distribute thru the Operators. But please – take ownership of your relationship with the consumer and take ownership of your brand.
This is happening. Marketing works. It will take time, but you need to get started.
Jason
I have always seen an excellent market opportunity here with mobile content. Operator portals seem to be the main source of content discovery and downloads.
I wrote an article discussing the marketing pros and cons back in October, you can read it here..
http://www.wirelessroundup.com/2007/10/06/killer-app-mobile-content-aggregation/