GDC China: Games on Deck Covers Mobile Gaming

As part of the recent Game Developer Conference China mobile track, Norbert Chang, Vice President and General Manager of Mobile at Walt Disney Internet Group in China examined the challenges of developing mobile games for the global market. In this excerpt from Games On Deck's coverage of his discussion, Chang discusses penetration differences among various types of business models in the US, Japan and Chinese markets: In the US market, Chang said that the top ten titles in this market tended to be casual and arcade focused games, with most of the titles present on at least one another gaming platform, PC or consoles, and that the US market's most successful business model is in single downloads: with customers downloading games once to store them locally and play as much as they want. In Japan Chang felt that the situation is quite different, with a market based in locally developed content that goes beyond single downloads to a subscription based service, with several "channels" (subscription services) for customers to use, each featuring from 32 to over 200 games. Games on Deck also covered Glu Mobile Asia-Pacific CTO Kim Daniel Arthur's discussion of the future of mobile gaming, in which he details big trends advancing in an increasingly connected world. From the feature: "The future mobile games distribution will also change, getting to be rich and flexible," Arthur continued, "probably based on game communities. Flexible in the sense, for example, of billing methods, using things like episodic content, in-game billing and pay-per-play schemes." "There will also be new game discovery methods: P2P sharing, for example, bridging the gap between PC and mobile devices. This will be encouraged with open internet usage, where the users are able to navigate internet as they do in PC, without having to go through the operator's portals." You can now read the full coverage of both the Challenges of Developing Mobile Games for the Global Market and the Future of Mobile Gaming events at Games on Deck.