Mobile Gaming Changing

Andy Nulman, CMO and president of 8-year-old, Montreal-based Airborne Entertainment, recently gave a keynote address and addressed the state of mobile gaming. An interview given about his speech was taken by GameDaily and offered some insight into why he feels that mobile gaming has pretty much stagnated before ever leaving the starting gate.

Mobile gaming has been, to-date, operating under the false assumption that it shoudl simply be a smaller screen version of what is available on primary gaming systems. The problem is - what happens when you take the exciting gameplay experience associated with a 5.1 surround experience and 52-inch screen and try to adapt that onto a 1.5-inch screen? You get a very unimpressive, unexciting, lifeless experience.

That's, aside from the occasional Tetris and poker apps, been the current mobile gaming trend, according to Nulman.

While the regular gaming community gets excited about games, spawning viral marketing opportunities and a group of people who "eat, breathe and sleep gaming," you will be hard-pressed to find the same in the mobile gaming crowd. Nulman says mobile gaming lacks passion - and the fault is the game direction. Instead of trying to produce big-screen (traditional) gaming onto the small-screen, the object should be to refocus on interactive, community-based games that cause users to interact with each other and their environment. Airborne Entertainment already has 4-5 of these types of games in the can, but they feel it will be around 2 years before the mobile community will be ready. It may take that long for carriers to want to branch out into something other than re-branded games based on movies and TV shows.

Part of being ready is the targeting of the new genre towards cell-phone users, not gamers. Gamers may never be satisfied with these types of games, but the appeal will be to a different crowd, with an emphasis on what makes gaming on the cell phone so unique. I don't know about anyone else, but I could see the feedback and gyroscopic capbilities of the Nintendo Wii integrating nicely into a cell phone for a very unique gaming experience.

Until then, Nulman feels the game developers will have to be content selling what the market is buying. That's not exactly a visionary approach, but I guess not everyone is Steve Jobs and can single-handedly change an industry overnight... Perhaps he should pitch Apple on his new ideas.