The death of the free cell-phone game.
By Justin Peters
Posted Monday, Oct. 22, 2007, at 12:11 PM ET
When I went shopping for a new cell phone this summer, I had two criteria. First, the phone had to work. The one I was using, a refurbished model that had been the height of tech-chic in 2003, was about as functional as a spoon. When I bought it, the salesman emphasized that it was made of metal. That sounded impressive at the time; it turned out that just meant it was heavy and clinked if you tapped it against your teeth. Second, my new phone had to come with a good selection of games. The cell-phone game is one of the great guilty pleasures of the modern age. Why bother "thinking" or "socializing" during dead spots in your day when you can watch a four-pixel snake eat dots? (I fondly remember Snaking my way through my college graduation ceremony—which, come to think of it, is an oddly apt metaphor for my entire undergraduate experience.)
Simple cell-phone games—Snake, Tetris, that one where you break bricks with a bouncing ball—are perfect for those situations where you need to kill time, like waiting in a line or riding a bus. They're also free, which is key for people like me, who are poor enough to have to wait in lines and ride the bus. At least I thought those games were free. On my quest for a new phone, I visited retail stores for five major service providers. Except for the wallet-busting BlackBerry, every single phone I looked at had no free games. Sure, they all have plenty of demos—limited-functionality versions of titles like NBA Live 07 and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Lockdown. If you like the demos, you can buy the full games for a full price. (Prices for mobile games vary by developer and service provider, but most seem to cost a shade under $10.) As I searched in vain for free, no-fi games like Snake, it hit me that the mobile games I knew and loved had gone extinct.
In the early part of this decade, cell phones started to become less about the phone call and more about the ring tone. Mobile-gaming types began to realize two things. First, if kids were willing to pay $3 for a 10-second snippet of a 50 Cent song, they'd probably be willing to pay some nonzero amount for a game. Second, consumers aren't going to buy the cow when they can play Virtual Milkmaid for free. It's obvious where this line of reasoning leads: Goodbye Tetris, hello $7 Tetris. But Tetris isn't the industry's endgame. Established gaming companies—images of a potentially multibillion-dollar market dancing in their heads—have bought out mobile-game studios and set to work manufacturing slimmed-down versions of full-platform games. (Electronic Arts paid $680 million for Jamdat Mobile in December 2005, for instance.) If you've felt a primal need to play Age of Empires II in an elevator (just $19.95 on a Windows Mobile Smartphone), your long and burdensome wait is over.
While European and Asian markets already produce billions of dollars worth of mobile-gaming revenue, the United States has yet to catch up. (Asians have always been gaming pioneers; Europeans need something to distract them during those interminable Eurail rides.) In a report from May of this year, tech industry research firm Gartner Inc. predicted that the North American mobile-gaming market would top $1.7 billion by 2011. However, overenthusiastic predictions of mobile-gaming dominance have become a tradition in the industry. A Wall Street Journal piece from Dec. 19, 2005, quotes one analyst's prediction that the North American mobile-gaming market would be worth $1.5 billion by 2008. At least as far as America is concerned, mobile gaming's Golden Age has turned out to be iron pyrite. Revenue projections are consistently missed, and the percentage of phone users who actually pay for mobile games has stayed in preteen digits.
Why is this? First, downloading games to your phone isn't always easy. The only thing one needs to operate a cell phone is opposable thumbs. But getting a game onto a phone, especially for an idiot like me, can be quite confusing. (Although you can click a button on your phone to download certain games from your service provider, you have to take to the Internet if you want a wider selection.) Plus, despite the claims of industry hype men, most cell-phone screens are just not fit for serious gaming. Moreover, a numeric keypad is not a substitute for a joystick, especially not for those of us with what are commonly termed "fat fingers."
The keypad dilemma speaks to a real issue in mobile-game development: platform standardization, or the lack thereof. You can take a copy of Halo 3, plug it into any Xbox anywhere, and be turret gunning your friends in minutes. But cell-phone operating systems vary widely by carrier and manufacturer, and every cell phone is configured differently. A game that works for Sprint won't necessarily work for Verizon; a game that works on a numeric keypad won't necessarily work on a touch screen. The lack of standardization is confusing for users and maddening for developers, who have to decide whether to build games for a single carrier and limit their audience, or go bankrupt and crazy trying to build 50 different Froggers for 50 different phone configurations.
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