Mobile gaming has now become the ‘In’ thing. I, myself unfortunately own a handheld device that is as up to date to download games and what not, however I do envy those who can because the variety of games via mobile now is remarkably vast. Every day in college I stumble upon students who are hooked to their smartphones not for the purpose of texting anymore but for the soul purpose of gaming. The progress of gaming itself has gone beyond what I have imagined considering the games I use to play were on old, chunky devices such as cartridge Gameboys by Nintendo.
These days, you would be regarded as oblivious if you not know the existence of Angry Bird. Angry Bird is safe to say the currently most popular game on a handheld device. The Guardian on Thursday, 19 May 2011 wrote an article on the progress of this gaming revolution stating that it is a phenomenon that is continuing to grow. It has generated big time revenue with more than 200 million downloads and the collaboration of the hit movie Rio. There are stories spreading around like wildfire stating that the developer, Rovio in in talks with expanding the franchise in difference locations around the globe. There are also talks about Disney collaborations. Angry bird has gotten its success due to the as-funds on Google-powered smartphones. Analytics firm Distimo and market research company Newzoo who focused research on Angry Bird Apple’s App Stores is planning to take advantage and expand commercial services.
These expansions of mobile devices have truly brought in revenue for affiliated companies. The idea is for the companies to cease the moment and understand the audience in the market in order to make this lucrative means last. This new form of gaming in the media ecosystem depends a lot on marketing strategies and audience research. Schriver (1997) discusses in his concept that document designers need to take a moment and stop their designing and understand how readers interact with the document itself. This is a helpful concept that can be applied in the gaming world because the marketers need to understand the needs of audiences before proceeding. So the mobile gaming world has to continue to meet the demands if they want to continue to expand. According to Soh and Tan (2008), there are three main factors that fuel mobile games and that developer’s need to keep in mind constantly, one being the fact of increasing mobile device penetration rates; the quality delivery of visuals and audio; and the accessibility of Wi-Fi that allows easy downloads. These factors have cause mobile gaming to increase in popularity and allowing viral marketing.
References
Dredge, S 2011, ‘Angry Birds: 200m downloads are the tip of the mobile gaming iceberg’, guardian, 19 May, < http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/appsblog/2011/may/19/iphone-game-stats>.
Schriver, KA 1997, Dynamics in document design: creating texts for readers, Wiley Computer Pub.,New York.
Soh, OB & Tan, CY 2008, ‘Mobile gaming’, Communications of the ACM, vol. 51, no.3, pp.35-39, viewed 11 June 2011, < http://web.ebscohost.com.ezlibproxy.unisa.edu.au/ehost/detail?sid=bae7437e-37ea-4cdc-866d-1693aa560650%40sessionmgr111&vid=5&hid=112&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=bth&AN=31317837>.
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