Mobile Monday London on Mobile Games

Turnout on Monday was good and the crowd was lively. These are my quick notes, and probably miss a lot! This was another great networking event from the MoMo team, and demonstrates the real buzz in the development community in London right now. Event flyer.

Panel

• Struan Robertson, NaturalMotion Games, @StruManchu
• Ian Baverstock, Tenshi Ventures, @ian_baverstock
• Georgina Mackenzie, Toytek, @Toytek
• Gareth Edmonson, Thumbstar Games, also vice-chairman of TIGA
• Oscar Clarke (chair), Papaya Mobile, @Athanateus

Trends

• iPad – great gaming device, shows that physical controller or keyboard not necessary
• High performance gaming, Tegra 3 etc
• Android generally
• Current ‘hobbyist’ model will be undermined when major players hit the market with their comparatively massive budgets and production values
• There will always be a desire to sell more content post initial-sale

Issues

• Discoverability – too many apps in the market, how do you differentiate, reach the audience
• Duplication of old games swamps the market (but twas ever thus)
• Fragmentation on Android big issue, perceived and actual. For startups, the additional investment in QA makes Android undesirable.
• QA on small teams
• Georgina: wrote most code in Obj-C, so locked into iOS. Wouldn’t do that again. Looking to code core modules in C++.

Opportunities

• Social mobile & gaming. General belief that this is only getting started; corollary is that social must be in the fabric of the game or app; can’t be bolted on later.
  • But if going into social mobile, will need an analytics team; expensive.
• Ditto for the ‘gamification’ of business apps.
• Huge quantity of realtime metrics now available to fine-tune designs, if you can take advantage of it.
• Ian: Smart TV offers opportunities, but has to be compelling to take a user’s focus away from an iPad game.

Other points

• Must integrate marketing with design in the team and act as-one.
• Ian: Initial feedback on HTML5 from games developers is not good, despite the opportunity to reduce fragmentation.
• Advertising (in-app) is only an adjunct to other sources of revenue (eg 20% on top of virtual goods, add-ons).
• General warning against in-game branding etc. Disrupts the experience and tends not to work anyway.
• Note from the floor, emerging markets are still based on BB/Java
  • Panel: Papaya is Chinese, is complicated market to work in
  • Georgina: Emerging markets keen on education s/w

Mentions

• Unity and Marmalade cross-platform mobile game engines mentioned a lot.
• Blue sky: decent AI please. Poor AI can snap you out of the moment.
• Georgina wants decent VR headsets. Me too.

Looking forward to the next meeting on data-driven mobile apps on Monday 13 February.