Casual Games are the Only Lucrative Mobile Games

David Collier also reports from GDC 2005 in Global Mobile Games: New Business Models, Hit Games, and Mobile People from Around the Planet. According to him, for a mobile games must be “desperately simple” to sell to its full potential because they stand out to people who would never, under normal circumstances, think of playing a videogame. However, mobile games have yet to find their real application, and most games for the platform are just ports of established console or handheld ideas; they aren’t really based on the intrinsic character of the mobile platform. There are complains that carriers do not give developers more freedom to push the envelope, to develop less “safe” games. He concludes with a deadlock situation game development is (need more advanced hardware, but users see little reasons to upgrade):

Only the most casual of games will sell widely enough to make money; only the lowest common denominator of games, technologically, will sell widely enough to get money . Until the baseline of hardware is more advanced, few games will really take advantage of the platform; yet users see little reason to upgrade to more advanced hardware, since in the end it’s just a telephone.