Interview

That was the year that was: Morten Nielsen, AGON Online

Charging 99c for a game is silly

That was the year that was: Morten Nielsen, AGON Online
As the year draws to an end, it's time to look back at what happened in the world of mobile gaming during 2009.

Equally, the lessons of history are useless without a future to demonstration what we've learnt, so as well as asking various notables about their view on the past 12 months, we're also getting them to look ahead to 2010.

You can see the full list of our end of year interviews here.

One of the big technological stories in iPhone gaming during 2009 has been the explosion in social gaming platforms. One such is Danish outfit Aptocore, which spun out of the wreckage of console developer Deadline Games.

Its AGON Online platform has been used by over 350 developers, and games such as Cobra Command, Eyegore's Eye Blast and Inkvaders.

Morten Nielsen is a software engineer and company co-founder.

Pocket Gamer: What was the most significant event of 2009?

Morten Nielsen: It's definitely the explosion of games in the App Store and the fact that the iPhone and iPod touch is now a real player in the games market with a completely different submission model than those employed by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.

It has been interesting to follow how Apple has been somewhat surprised by the scale of the App Store's success and how this has eventually resulted in the iPod touch now being firmly marketed as a gaming device.

Yet an honorable mention goes out to Sony for at least trying to be innovative with the new PSP Minis concept. It will be interesting to follow where that leads in 2010.

What was the most significant event for Aptocore?

We have invested a lot of time and effort into making AGON Online an interesting social gaming platform for iPhone developers and as such the launch and continued growth of AGON Online has been the biggest event for us.

An honourable mention goes out to the recent launch of the AGON Online-enabled iPhone game Formula 1 2009 from Codemasters.

What was your favourite mobile game of 2009?

I haven't had the time to play that many games. One recent game that I have spent a significant amount of time playing though is Soosiz. I really enjoyed how the gameplay revolves around the local gravity of each platform and the way this plays together with the control of the character. It feels very smooth and as a whole I think it is a very solid platform game on the iPhone platform.

Another honorable mention goes to Planet God, which is an AGON Online-enabled game that I spent a lot of time with during the summer.

What do you predict will be the most important trends in 2010?

Android Market will hopefully start to become a viable alternative and/or compliment for developers, although sales reports are sounding rather grim at the moment. Also a number of games will probably manage to make in-app purchases work really, really well.

More generally it will be interesting to see how many games will become free and provide the full game as an in-app purchase. The word 'social' will probably play an even bigger role in the mobile gaming market in the new year.

If you could enforce one New Year's resolution, what would it be?

It would be really nice if somebody could come up with a viable solution to end the current 99c App Store standard. 99c for a game that somebody spent 3-6 man-months developing is silly, but unfortunately with the current market structure it seems like the only way to make any sales.

Maybe freemium can solve this and allow developers to at least charge, say 99c per level or level pack and that way sell the game for a more reasonable total price.

Thanks to Morten for his time.

You can keep up-to-date with the activity at Aptocore and AGON Online via its consumer and its developer websites. It also has a twitterfeed.

Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.