Casual gaming going mobile

February 11, 2010

Wandering the floor of Casual Connect in Hamburg today has me marvelling at how quickly casual gaming is shifting to mobile.

Every serious web-based casual and skill gaming firm now seems to be placing mobile smack on their road map. This was not the case a year ago.

The interest is understandable. Content consumption via mobile is outpacing the web. By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide, as per a recent Gartner prediction.

Less clear to me is the ease at which extending into mobile for traditional web gaming firms will unfold.

Developing an iPhone game is one thing (and may well be the logical first step), but building casual games for the vast majority of feature phones on the market would seem to require a wholly mobile mindset from conception. Everything from offering a mobile games portal to end consumers to developing a game that is compatible with the myriad handsets on themarket, from mobile advertising to mobile billing, all would seem to require specialized expertise in mobile.

Perhaps I’m overestimating the complexity of porting from web to mobile, but we did witness such challenges before when media brands attempted to make the extension from web into mobile. I suspect we may experience an emergence of mobile casual gaming specialists that can help shepherd this trend.

Perhaps the biggest highlight of the day involved shaking hands with Vitaliy Khit of Ukraine, father of the original Bubble Shooter !

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posted in venture capital by mark

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