Mobile Games More Than Time Fillers—Trip

Mobile Games More Than Time Fillers—Trip

• Posted by James Quintana Pearce
• Mon 05 Mar 2007 10:52 PM

Digital Chocolate CEO Trip Hawkins opened the Game Developers Conference 2007 with his GDC Mobile keynote… from media reports it was vintage Trip, but he had a few extra comments—or at least phrased differenty. GameDailyBiz had the following line: “The current mobile model, which is generally a solitary way of killing time, is just flat out wrong, Hawkins said. The idea of the social experience is everything.” Trip has been banging on about the social aspects of mobile games since he founded Digital Chocolate, but this was a good way of putting it. There is a market for time-filling mobile games, it’s just not a very stable one because people don’t have a strong attachment to “time fillers”, and they’re often quite happy to download one and keep playing it for years. There’s some angst that many people download one game and then don’t come back to download another, with the idea that is because of a bad experience—it could just as easily be because they only need one time filler game on their handset. There’s also some disconnect between the idea that people only use mobile content to fill in time and mobile phones are the one device they take everywhere: That’s true for a lot of people, but on the other hand a lot of people (mostly youth, but not completely) use their mobiles as a portal to the world.
At AE Interactive they’ve got an interview with Trip after his keynote, with this gem: “By offering games like Tetris on the most promoted part of the deck itself, the carriers shoot themselves in the foot by stopping consumers from browsing. They haven’t learned, as grocers have, to put the milk in the back of the store, Hawkins said.” This is sort of true—if a consumer wants Tetris, and they know it’s on the operator portal, they’ll find it. If they open the deck and see a list of games they don’t know they may not scroll through to see the Tetris game. There may be a way to highlight other games while still letting people know the popular brands are on the deck, but it’s one of those “limited space” issues that plague mobile content. Of course, once people are used to buying content on mobile phones it will be easier to follow this particular advice of Trip’s.