Physical and Virtual Platforms

Mobile phone gaming platforms currently lag console-PC gaming in technology and depth of content. Historically the console-PC market is the sole supplier to the "lifestyle gamer." Extracting value from mobile gaming is not a simple crossover of product name association. Fit must follow form in establishing immersive environments. Bad jobs by game publishers in trying to map console and server-based games to the mobile phone still makes lifestyle gamers wary of phones.  This is a huge market if exploited successfully.  Best seller console-PC games now gross billions and are rivaling film franchises as exploitable media content property.

But today, for this market, mobile phones are only being used in tandem with PC gaming. For example, two companies, Blizzard and Steam, introduced a mobile authentication system for games. The Steam Trading Card system is a meta-game system around other games.  Steam controls purchase and user-to-user trading of in-game artifacts. Steam takes a small transaction fee for using their authentication tool allowing secured non-reputable trading transactions.  Authenticated, mobile phone trades occur instantly; while out of system, direct player to player trades take days to complete.

Games with depth or immersive "world view" construction are a potential market opportunity. Tie-ins with turn-based Role Playing Games (RPG) work with existing technical limitations on the phone to provide some immersion in the gaming experience.  Accommodating to the technical limitations of phones as a delivery platform, one approach is nostalgia. Final Fantasy 9, a popular console game of years past, is imminently forthcoming for Android, iOS and Windows. Final Fantasy fans might appreciate that the game on a modern mobile phone doesn't look a whole lot different from the original. The phone is extending the life-span of an otherwise potentially obsolete game.

Also smaller scope phone game tie-ins extend the virtual world’s immersive experience to simple individual play; for example, the multi-player interactive, real-time First Person Shooter console game Halo. Set in the Halo world, but a separate game, in Halo for mobile platforms, the user drives an armed vehicle and runs around shooting aliens. This provides the illusion of depth and context by keying on emotions and loyalty developed elsewhere in the large environment console game.  It extends the phone market to the console crowd.

By simple extension, a way to add depth might be to tie mobile games to Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs).  MMORPGs are a combination of role-playing game and online game in which a large number of players interact with one another within a virtual world. The depth of these games is greater even than platform-bound games on PCs and consoles. But the network data usage, memory requirements, storage requirements, control systems and graphic demands of these games are greater than current mobile phone technology. A major obstacle publishers generally need to overcome is that the game can’t take up too much space on the phone. Users prefer not to sacrifice too much limited phone storage to mobile games. It may be that MMORPGs will not transition to the mobile phone.  Instead brand new uses of the phone for games will be needed.

Natural Fit

My daughter was going through security at the airport wearing a Pokémon hat – a rather obvious orange critter.  “Is that a Charizard on your head?” My daughter responded with a small laugh of relief, “Why yes, my friend made it for me.” The guard pulls out his wallet and opens it up. There within is an original print holographic trading card of a Charizard. “It’s my favorite character. I’ve carried around this card for 16 years.”  Cartoon drawing style fits with mobile screen graphic drivers. Millions of kids were raised on classic Pokémon: the anime, the trading card game, and the hand held console games. That is a huge potential of locked-up emotion that an ICT business can leverage.

Gamers expect the next winner of the mobile gaming market to be the forthcoming Nintendo Pokémon GO. It will put Pokémon on phones where the phone becomes a PokéBall, a device used to capture and collect the Pokémon monsters. This is a natural use for the phone that is consistent with the game mythology. It makes use of the mobility of the phone to allow the finding of characters in different places.  I expect it will overflow with marketing tie-in as brick and mortar stores perhaps buy rights to offer Pokémon characters that the players come to capture. The millions of past Pokémon collector/player kids are a dedicated marketplace. Other similar anime platforms likely will follow this lead to market.