Mobile gaming experience

From ft.com

Report by Richard Waters

Trip Hawkins has a bold idea about online games: starting from a small point and starting from a low price.

As the founder of Electronic Arts, the world's largest game developer, Mr. Hawkins once wanted video games to have a film-like visual effect, he established his distribution model by referring to the practice of selling products directly to retail stores in the music industry.

In the next 20 years, advances in desktop technology and the development of 3D images have brought this ideal closer to reality.

But Mr. Hawkins believes today's gaming rules are changing. Internet, especially mobile Internet access, opens up a new big market for the entertainment industry. However, this market is very different from the current game industry of $17 billion. From this point of view, gaming technology should no longer be aimed at improving the fidelity, so that the visual effect is getting closer and closer to the real life. Other considerations have become more important.

"What people want is interaction and control," said Mr. Hawkins. "To this end, they are willing to give up on fidelity ."

They also want to communicate. He said that it is estimated that as many as 30 million of the world's "fantasy sports leagues" Participants prove that people are playing online games rather than looking for an immersive experience, it is better to join a larger circle.

As "featured mobile phones" with color screens and a small amount of computing functions enter the mass market, these mobile phones have become a platform that allows providers to meet their needs for online games in a new way.

"Most of your daily life is in such a rush, and now you happen to have a small computer around you at any time," said Mr. Hawkins.

Mr. Hawkins, one of the most visionary players in the gaming industry, never scales out in pursuit of the next bold vision. After leaving the Electronic Art company in 1991, he was ambitious to change the operating model of the game console business. 3do, which he created, wants to sell its console technology to other hardware manufacturers in the form of licenses, following the successful experience of Microsoft in the personal computer field. After this attempt failed, he tried to turn 3do into a game developer and ended in defeat.

For his latest company digital chocolate, he will focus on mobile phones. He believes that this is a perfect "breakthrough technology". It is a cheap and simple product that steals business from more mature, exquisite and expensive products, create a new business model that is inconsistent with the business model of the industry leader.

He said the mainstream players in the gaming industry have moved mobile phones to secondary platforms. Hollywood regards cell phones as "Mini TVs", Silicon Valley regards them as "PCs in clothing bags", while the gaming industry regards mobile phones as "lame Gameboy ".

From these perspectives, the gaming experience that mobile phones can bring to people looks primitive. However, "Special Mobile Phones" are moving towards the public market. Mr. Hawkins said about 1.5 billion of the 0.2 billion mobile phones currently in use belong to this type. In five years, the figure will jump to 2 billion.

Designing a game that can run on this new platform and leveraging its strengths as a communication tool means a fresh start. "It forces us to come up with something simple," Mr. Hawkins said.

As for how small and simple it is, you can see the bubble Ducky. This is a game launched by digital chocolate at the beginning of this year. Players use a cartoon rubber duck to crack matching bubbles and publish their scores on an online bulletin board.

Mr. Hawkins believes that part of the attraction of the game is extremely simple: people don't have to spend time learning and can play in a very short time. It is also attractive because it can connect to a broader social circle. Half of the 20 thousand paying users of the game posted their scores online, compared with other users.

As far as development is concerned, such games have almost no development costs, but thanks to the spread characteristics of online games, once they become popular, they can reach a very large audience. Moreover, the low price of these games also enables developers to carry out regular experiments and a high market segment, "Digital chocolate" has a game targeting 2 to 3 years old children.

Compared with the increasing development costs and powerful functions of the console game field, all this seems very far away.