MGF 2009: 'You can't just plonk one game on another platform...'

Social networking and Web 2.0 were under the spotlight at the Mobile Games Forum conference in London this morning, with Nokia, Digital Chocolate and 3 Austria all highlighting the potential for these technologies for the mobile games industry.

“It's phenomenally successful for us,” said Robert Unsworth, VP of sales EMEA at Digital Chocolate. “We launched on Facebook in 2007, and within a very short space of time over two million people had installed Tower Bloxx.

"Since then we've launched two more applications for Facebook, with the latest being Party Island, where we're up into the hundreds of thousands [of users], yet we're still in beta stage. It's all word of mouth so far.”

Is Facebook - and the parallel business of selling PC games - just about promoting DChoc's mobile games, or are they businesses in their own right?

“They're very much a business in their own right,” he said. “But they also have the significant uplift of providing promotion for our core business, which remains mobile. But the other platforms are increasingly gaining on that in terms of turnover.”

However, launching a mobile game on Facebook isn't always a recipe for a huge explosion in the number of people playing it. Mark Ollila, director of technology and strategy at Nokia, explained that the company has been investigating Facebook with N-Gage, but that “80 per cent of the gameplay for Reset Generation is actually on the mobile side”.

The panel also considered how to make money out of connectivity and social features in mobile games. Is connectivity becoming a source of revenue in mobile?

Unsworth said even simple features in mobile games like a 'Get More Games' link can be worthwhile. “We see about 10 to 14 per cent of our sales coming from people clicking on that option,” he said.

But he stressed that one way social aspects to games pay for themselves is the virality, as players engage with their friends.

“We want people to become our marketeers,” he said. “We want our games to be a tool to communicate and interact, and if you have those social features in there, there's a much bigger chance people will recommend the games to their friends.”

Ollila addressed the topic for N-Gage too, saying its N-Gage Arena isn't about making more money as such. “The first-party titles we have been creating have been encouraging the multiplay connected gaming aspects,” he said.

“The majority of the connected traffic is being driven by those features that we're providing in the first-party titles.”

He also said N-Gage Arena now has around 700,000 registered members, but that this is just the start as the company embeds the N-Gage client on more handsets in 2009.

“Each player has about an average of five players on their friend lists at the moment, but that will obviously grow.

“Ultimately the best social network is the one that's in your phonebook on the handset,” continued Ollilla, saying Nokia is looking at how to integrate this, together with handset location features and the N-Gage platform, into some kind of community.

Interestingly, Vodafone's Jessica Gwyther chimed in from the audience later in the debate, saying how the operator is looking at integrating services - possibly including gaming - into the Zyb address book client it acquired last year.

But Ollilla admitted that making money is still the second priority when it comes to social features in games. “How that's monetised? We're still examining and learning from all the data that we're getting. We're still newcomers in this area to some extent. But we're very committed to gaming, and to this internet way of working.”

Unsworth said publishers needed to be careful when using Web 2.0 and social media to promote their games. “It's potentially very valuable, but our approach at the moment is really to focus on the games and the social elements within them, and allow those elements to speak for themselves, and leverage their viral elements. But it's certainly something we discuss actively.”

Fabian Seydewitz, head of products and services at 3 Austria, said the operator has been keen to use every technology possible to raise awareness and build confidence among consumers about mobile games.

But Unsworth advised publishers not to just slap their mobile games into Facebook and expect great things from it. “You can't just take one game and plonk it on another platform and expect it to work,” he said. “Some games don't work, and we know that.”