Brands and mobile gaming have a bittersweet history, it's fair to say.There's no doubt that branded games have driven the market, whether based on console games, films, sports stars, boardgames, TV shows or retro gaming brands. Brands sell.Yet branded games have harmed the industry too. Well, the bad ones have. How many hundreds of thousands of consumers have bought a mobile game based on a brand they love, thought it was rubbish, and never came back?The industry needs brands, yet it's been held back by them. How's that for a dysfunctional relationship? Or, to go into more specifics:Brands are important because they're trusted. For someone who doesn't consider himself to be a gamer, a familiar brand can be the tipping point that makes him shell out up to a fiver on a mobile game for the first time.They provide credibility, in other words. And mobile games need it among the wider world, like it or not.And y'know what? Brands should make good games. Films, console games and TV shows are full of bold characters and action-packed storylines. Boardgames and retro games tap into our fond memories.Lots of us want to spend the odd ten minutes as Theo Walcott, Lewis Hamilton or Andy Murray. Brands should be ideal material. And yet, somehow...Brands are important because a bad branded game does immeasurable harm to the industry as a whole. Not least because many operators still promote them, ensuring big sales and equally big disappointment for players.Perhaps a better way of rephrasing this point is to say that getting branded games right is important. The heightened expectations of any popular brand mean a spin-off game can't just be average. Publishers often learn this only from experience.Take Glu, which flubbered its first Transformers game, but then got it right with the recent Transformers: G1 Awakening.
The latter won excited plaudits from the kind of games bloggers who usually sneer at mobile, just from its video trailer. Hopefully EA Mobile's next Simpsons game will follow a similar path of improvement.Brands are important because every other gaming platform built its own. Thinking about brands and mobile games isn't just about 'whose IP can we piggyback off next?'. It should also be about building brands that are exclusive to mobile.Every other gaming platform did: Halo, Super Mario Bros, Sonic The Hedgehog, Grand Theft Auto and Pac-Man all started off as original IP. Building brands is what defines a platform.Mobile publishers do know this. Gameloft has multimillion-selling own-IP franchises like Asphalt and Block Breaker Deluxe, while EA Mobile had a bash with Orcs & Elves, and Glu has released a series of own-IP titles.RealArcade's Playman is still going strong, while Nokia is ploughing resources into N-Gage-exclusive IP. All this may not be reflected in the sales charts yet, but as operators and retailers get better at selling original games, this'll change.There's no choice between brands or no brands for this industry. The way forward is a healthy mixture of the two: great branded games that don't squeeze original titles out of the retail channels and thus stop them becoming brands in their own right.
