The 3Cs of mobile games – “Casual”, “Consumers” and “Community”

(PRLEAP.COM) Casual games built on a positive consumer experience and community. These are the 3 cornerstones of mobile games growth according to findings of Wireless World Forum’s mobile games Executive Research Panel– a group of over 20 senior mobile games executives who have contributed to the “Developing and Marketing Casual Mobile Games” report published today.

Casual mobile games such as Tetris and chess are a growing segment – accounting for 52% of the $1.6 billion mobile games industry. However, providers are overlooking the real long term value of casual mobile games by underestimating the importance of a positive consumer experience and ignoring the role of community in generating long term appeal.

“The mobile games sector still talks of casual users and casual gamers. They simply don’t exist” adds Graham Brown, CEO of Wireless World Forum and lead author of the report.

“We need to adopt a consumer rather than engineering focused approach to making these games profitable at lower break-even points. This means ‘customer’ not ‘content’ is king. We found that the industry is slowly adapting but the pace may not be fast enough for the less forgiving – customers, operators and investors. We, as a sector, still think community is about ‘multiplayer’ and mistake low demand for a need to ‘educate the user’.”

The report provides recommendations for dealing with the key challenges facing the sector today. In particular, its contributors recommend:
a) Changing our language from “users” to “consumers” to help us better understand how casual games fit into the buying landscape
b) Developing casual games on social drivers – multiplayer functionality is not the only way to achieve this, society can also be built around a game
c) Marketing casual games to a wider audience utilizing different charging models

“Developing and Marketing Casual Mobile Games” is the first in a series of four mobile games reports published today by Wireless World Forum in association with their Executive Research Panel.

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