PSP World

Mobile gaming: Will Sony Ericsson's PSP Variant be a Catalyst for the Market?

A new market research report by visiongain predicts that the introduction of the PSP phone will be crucial to the mobile gaming market.

The report reads:

The brand new mobile gaming report from visiongain says that mobile gaming showing signs of slowdown due to rising costs.

Since 2003, much anticipation has surrounded the nascent mobile gaming business, a new area of fusion between the burgeoning mobile communications and video gaming industries. That year, mobile gaming was to enter into a new phase of development driven by three key factors:
The increasing saturation prevalent in the major developed economies which pushed mobile network operators to diversify revenue streams as the traditional pillars of subscriber growth and voice margins began to deteriorate.

The emergence of downloadable technologies and enabled handsets to offer a compellingly simple platform for the delivery of games, with the added significant advantage of focused charging methods to be integrated into existing operator billing mechanisms.

The emergence of packet-switched data capability in the form of 2.5G networks (GPRS and CDMA 1xRTT) which set the scene for the mass migration to 3G networks two years later. Prior to 2003, mobile gaming had only ever made an impact in Japan and South Korea, particularly in terms of NTT DoCoMo's i-mode business model. Crucially for mobile gaming in those countries, i-mode was and remains based on a revenue share model designed in favour of content providers, who receive 90% of download fees. This model thus spawned unprecedented growth but has never been favoured by European and North American operators to the detriment of mobile gaming in the West.

In the intervening years between 2003 and 2007, mobile gaming in Europe experienced significant growth from an adoption perspective, business model evolution and technological progress. Operator portals such as Vodafone live! and T-Mobile's t-zones fed a growing consumer appetite for downloadable Java and Symbian games. Alternative off-network portals run by distributors such as Handango and Jamba/Jamster, were also considered successful. Major publishers from the console space such as EA and THQ moved into mobile gaming, bringing popular console titles such as the SIMS, the FIFA football games series and Sonic to mobile phones. In 2006, an estimated 14% of UK mobile subscribers had downloaded at least one mobile game, double the figure for the previous year. Mobile gaming was truly on the rise.

By 2007, the overall picture for mobile gaming had begun to display signs of slight deterioration brought on by the rising costs of porting applications across multiple platforms and operator-centric revenue share models. The following developments appear to define the current evolutionary stage of mobile gaming:
Top mobile publishers EA Mobile and THQ reported falling earnings over H1 2007 while the proportion of mobile subscribers downloading games had remained static.
In the mobile operator domain, mobile gaming had slipped as a priority, taking a back seat to mobile TV, mobile music and user-generated content on European operator portals in particular.

A standstill in video gaming has also taken place in parallel, with only casual gaming -exemplified by Web-based Flash games and the Nintendo Wii - experiencing growth while other next generation consoles the PS3 and Xbox fail to live up to expectations. Mobile gaming's promise in delivering a lucrative boom industry still remains valid nonetheless, with advances in network technology (HSPA and UMB), hardware acceleration and 3D graphics forming potential future drivers. However, mobile gaming arguably requires a solid catalyst to finally deliver a genuine critical mass and a sustainable market presence for the industry.

In this report, visiongain introduces a potential catalyst for both the mobile and video gaming markets in the form of convergence between portable handheld gaming consoles and mobile phones.

VIA