As part of Pocket Gamer Connects San Francisco 2015, Nick Thomas, Head of Gaming at Immersion, gave a talk on the importance of haptic technology in mobile games.

Haptic technology, in Thomas' words, is "the art of creating tactile feedback in meaningful and engaging ways", such as vibration and touch feedback.

A world without sound

This is important to mobile since, as Thomas quoted George Lucas as saying, "audio is 50% of the experience" for most things, but this is largely missing from mobile games which are played on mute or in loud environments.

There is also data to support the idea that haptic technology works. Thomas pointed a study performed on a simple slots game, which "saw close to a 40% lift in retention" in the day 30 retention figures when users had haptic technology, versus the users who did not.

You can see all our videos from Pocket Gamer Connects San Francisco 2015 in this YouTube Playlist.