Where Are All of the Games?
Written by AndroidGuys • May 14th, 2008 • Category: Developer News, Recent NewsWith all of the hype this week about the applications received for the Android Developers Challenge, there’s one thing many might overlook. There are pretty much no games in the top 50 semi-finalists. Why is this so? We know for a fact that there are scores of mobile games that were created and/or ported for Android. Take a look at SlideMe.org or HelloAndroid for any length of time and you’ll see just how many are out there.
Was there a bias towards location based services and social networking? We know that there are members from the Open Handset Alliance making up the judging panel. Could it be that they were looking for things that might integrate into devices and work as services? Is there perhaps a hidden agenda behind the decision making? Some sort of unconscious motivation to look for things that could be monetized? It’s a little harder to get residual income out of a game than it is to a social networking service you can subscribe to.
Maybe we’re getting all worked up over nothing. The thing is, it’s not “nothing” to the hundreds of developers out there who spent the last 5+ months slaving away at a game. It’s not a dead market. Heck, it’s not even dying yet. With all of the potential hardware going into the Android handsets, mobile gaming should see a boon. So, let’s here it… Where did all of the games go?
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Games are huge in the industry, so it was initially surprising that none of the games made it into the top 50. My guess is it all about mobile advertising, which is Google’s focus. With LBS apps, you can generate all sorts of advertising revenue, everything from restaurants to shoe stores. You just can’t do mobile advertising as easily in a game. This appears to be a movement away from the download revenue model, which doesn’t bode well for mobile games.
I’m unsure who’s spreading the myths that games did not win.
Check out this site for more details on the winners:
http://phandroid.com/2008/05/10/adc-round-1-winners/
These are definitely games:
City Slikkers
Joyity
Rayfarla
There are also 4 unnamed winners which could each have been games.
Many of the apps I saw previously announced for Android (but that weren’t chosen) did not take advantage of Android’s unique capabilities. They were basically ports of existing games like Tetris, Asteroids, Space Invaders, …
I am curious why games like Parallel Kingdom have gone quiet though. Perhaps they won & are now in stealth mode?
City Slikkers seems to combine maps with gaming so they can get the LBS ad revenue.
For carriers, LBS and social apps drive network traffic, meaning it drives revenue, while games do not. Carriers can brand and run their own communities or social networks, making their services sticker than any game could.
There is a bit of a catch here. My bet is that many social applications are going to require integration with carriers systems: MMSc, SMSc, PPGs, to name a few. There is nothing I know of in the OHA agreement that carriers have to make their network open to third-party nodes which support these social network services. This could be a brilliant play to open up everything and nothing at the same time.
“These are definitely games:
City Slikkers
Joyity
Rayfarla”
These are definitely not games. Rayfarla has learning games, but it a music app and not a game.
The other two would be like calling Google Maps a game.
Note it’s not just games, but developer tools also did not make the list.
My submission was really a developer tool with games. So even had I won I would have still wanted to see games in the list and mine would not have been one of them.
@Travis: You’re right when you say City Slikkers is not a casual game, but nevertheless it is a game in a way we have only seen a few before (see the works from Blast Theory or It’s Alive). There are specific rules, a unique game world, goals to achieve, etc. By the way, we used Google Maps only only is a tool, that does not say it cannot be a game, By the way, the final version will have its own Map Engine. But this takes some time.