I haven’t missed out on a single MoMo Amsterdam up to now. Already 9! The crowd and atmosphere were as usual very vibrant. The Rode Hoed on the Keizersgracht full up to the balcony, with young ‘mobilistas’ in their late 20s and early 30s, blogging on their MacBooks or twittering on their iPhone, amazing how Apple has now completely taken over the creative crowd. Quite a few G1 phones were also spotted, so this is not your average population in terms of market penetration.

The theme of MoMo#9 was mobile gaming. The quality of the afternoon was mixed, some talks quite boring, some very exciting. Jeroen Elfferich (ExMachina) kicked off with some statistics, most impressive are the investments in the mobile gaming industry: from $400 million in 2007 to $1.1 billion in 2008! So there is enough going on to fuel innovation in the coming years. Some 80% of the Dutch population plays games once in a while, only 12% on mobile, a whole area to do business.

There were a couple of short presentations by gaming companies, amongst other Lunagames that is building a game portal tvgames.nl for TV related games like Deal or No Deal. Not too exciting, mostly offline games and some multiplayer games, but no live audience games.

Kamar Shah, expert in mobile gaming having worked a long time for Nokia, summarized the biggest problem for mobile gaming: Find, Try, Buy, Manage, Share. These five elements must be easy, intuitive and accessible for consumers. “Apple has done a great job at it!”, he said with mixed feelings.

Barry O’Neill, from Namco, the company behind PacMan (1955), showed the differences between a successful Japanese market and the European/American markets. Whereas in Japan the operators have created an open ecosystem for developers by tight control over the phones and more than 80% revenue share to the developers, the European market is fragmented, dominated by the phone vendors and with often less than 30% revenue share for the developers. So why didn’t KPN succeed with i-mode (86% rev share for developers)? Not enough belief to push it through completely?

Nicolas Nova explained the difficulties of creating good location-based games, but his story remained very theoretical. A pity, since his research is based on observing and interviewing many players of such games, so a few concrete examples would have illustrated the issues much better.

Finally MegaPhone gave a stunning demo of live, multi-player games that can be deployed on the streets. For those consumers that are bored of playing mobile games on their little screens, MegaPhone offers a totally new experience. The company has combined digital signage (also known as narrowcasting) and IVR technologies to offer one huge interactive console experience. The idea is for consumers to dial in to the number displayed on the screen. They can then control the game via the buttons of their mobile phone or even their voice. It ended up with the whole Rode Hoed theater echoing from people shouting ‘GRAB!’ into their phone so their little avatar would grab the most popcorn on the screen. Megaphone has released an SDK, now everyone can build their own game using their technology. Prices depend on number of players, duration of event and frequency of play.

All in all a good MoMo, hopefully the next one will focus on a few excellent speakers and leave more time to network with the other attendants.

Photos courtesy of Maurits Meester, e-mmer.

Tags: game, interactive, Mobile, momo, Social

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 13:02 and is filed under Events, Mobile, Software, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.