Blog

As a follow-up to one of our earlier posts, I found a good interview with Anna Kang of Fountainhead Entertainment (developer of Orcs & Elves and the Doom RPG) talking about the mobile games market.

Here’s her take on some of the challenges the industry is facing, particularly in North America:

I believe there’s a bit of re-inventing the wheel that needs to be done in North America when it comes to mobile gaming. Similar to the early days of computer gaming, the mobile gaming industry isn’t being taken seriously at the moment.

The service providers are in a similar place that computer manufacturers were in the early days. The primary objective of said devices were not to play games, but when good games came along, gamers helped drive the sales of computers.

The gaming industry is now a multi-billion dollar industry and gamers are an important customer base to computer manufacturers. Cell phone service providers will have to learn that getting good games to their customers will help drive sales of mobile devices, mobile services, and create a revenue source that can enhance their services and their bottom line.

Read the whole thing on Games Industry.

The comparison to the early days of personal computing — specifically the era before the predominance of the IBM PC, when multiple manufacturers were releasing incompatible systems (Commodore, Altair, Amiga) — is an interesting one. What do you guys think?