Anybody makes games for Mobile Phones?

[Yuriy O]

Hi guys.

Does anyone make games for cell phones here?
PDA? Hows the markter cell vs pda games now?

[PoV]

Phone market is *much* better.

[Yuriy O]

Phone market is *much* better.

That's what I'm reading.

[Applewood]

Agreed. Its not so much that cellphone market is better. It's more a case of "there actually *is* a cellphone market" !

[shoecake]

I was doing OK from PDA market (PocketPC only) a year ago, three games were making about 60 sales (altogether) a month which was a welcome addition to the Windows and Mac sales. Since then sales have dropped quite a bit, I think it's just that Handango (where most sales came from) got quite saturated with games and it was becoming much harder to get your game noticed without giving up bigger percentages of profits (less profit = more visability.) They already took 40% of the profits, I wasnt keen to give them much more! I've not really focused much on the PDA market since my Mac sales are doing so well.

I did start porting my games to Smartphone and probably will complete them some time soon (just for the fun of it) but the PDA thing was quite short lived, I'm not really that keen to focus too much time on that PDA/Mobile market. I don't really have much confidence in it.

Phone market is *much* better.
Do you mean for Java games or also for Smartphone/Symbian stuff too?

Cheers,

Paul

[Jason Chong]

I am working in a mobile content company now. One of my task is developing j2me games.

I think the market is more towards j2me (midp1 and 2) now.

Symbian and Windows smartphone won't cut it.

Symbian lacks proper documentation, the symbian developer himself is not confident of it.

Smartphone lacks proper vendor pushing and very buggy and expensive. MS wants to push you towards dotnet instead of c/C++.


We've stopped focusing on smartphones, mostly focusing on j2me
apps/games nowadays.

As for profitability, i think mostly companies that are content providers/aggregators themselves make the money.

As a developer, I don't think you will make much, you have to go through network operators and content/aggregrators before you even see your money. At least that's the case here since Network operators no longer wants to deal with developers on an individual basis, they insist and redirect all developers to go through their selected content aggregator partners.
You have to deal with 2 middle guys and hope they don't rip you off. Very difficult for me to trust 2 middle guys between my customer!

This is a major block towards generating proper money for developers.

I'll take indie downloadable games development over cellphone game development anytime until I find a way to cut out the middle guys and have better control over my IP rights.

THe aggregators are the pain and also the ones reaping benefits together
with the network operators. I don't think this field will benefit you much
as a developer. (I work in a content provider/aggregator company and we deal with submissions from developers as well)

[shoecake]

As a developer, I don't think you will make much, you have to go through network operators and content/aggregrators before you even see your money. At least that's the case here since Network operators no longer wants to deal with developers on an individual basis, they insist and redirect all developers to go through their selected content aggregator partners.

This is what I thought. It was much easier and profitable a year or two ago but now it feels like I have to pay (or give up much bigger royalties) in order to get my "little indie games" noticed.

I will continue with Smartphone & PocketPC development because it's nice and easy and fun to do. As with the Windows Desktop, there's always going to be a big ugly commercial market that doesn't cater for the smaller indie developers. I don't care to be involved in that, the same way I don't really care about the bigger cellphone/pda markets. As long as i can reach enough customers to make it worthwhile that'll do me.

I know my PDA sales have dropped a great deal over the past year but I think it's more down to how little marketing I've done in that area ever since my Mac games started to sell good and took up more of my time/focus :rolleyes:

Cheers,

Paul

[serg3d]

I'm in the process of completing my first Symbian game (I have gameplay and graphics in place, now testing, writing all the menues/text windows and balansing the difficalty). I heared a lot of both bad and good opinins about viability of the symbian games, I guess the only way to be sure is try myself and see. The programming itself is not much more difficalt then for example MFC programming. Of cause native graphic support is non-existant (well it exists but not useful for performance reasons), so for any non-trivial graphics you have to either write it yourself or buy some 3d party library (the only soluion if you have no low-level software 2D/3D graphics expirience).
I was not able to find any relayable statistical data for Handango. For example if the "downloads" they list near the game are purchases or demo download. If it's a demo downloads, then Handango sales are pretty much nonexistant for smartphones - 20000 downloads for best selling games during a year - that is about 400 sales (if conversion rate for smartphones is the same as for PDA), sounds not good.

[MirekCz]

Yes, downloads mean number of trial downloads.

One thing you should not, very many trial downloads happen on my-symbian.com (with separate download counter), on my product at one time it was something like 2000dls on handango vs 16000 on my-symbian.

From my personal experience sales are around 500-1000 pieces of good products with high price (around 20$ price). This is for handango and similar sites (all together).

There are several games which sold several? more? thousands of copies for low price (like 7-10$) - but that's a very small percentage of games released and they are VERY high quality (look at skyforce).

All in all I think that PDA/smartphone market is good for fast, but not high income. Most programs/games are getting much less sales then initially after few months and that's where they end bringing good income.
Therefore for a long-time performace this market might not be the best choice.
You simply have to roll out a new game every 3months where with mac/windows games you can get good sales even after few years. And Handango is getting a big chunk of your money :(

[rhm]

What are the best sites for phone games and who are the biggest players in this business?

[MirekCz]

Best site for selling is clearly www.handango.com. You can also sell products from nokia's shop (www.softwaremarket.nokia.com).... all other places give you much less sales...

for best developers you can see handango top-10 games list.
Look at the authors of Interstellar flames, MGS Karting and SkyForce... I think those games are from the top 3 companies in current games shareware market on Symbian mobile phones. (check on handango's site for other products from those developers to learn more about their other games)

[Savant]

Coming from another angle (and to resurrect this thread), what would be the preferred method of attack if someone wanted to write applications for cell phones? Symbian? WinCE? I'm really not familiar with the market at all but I have a good idea for an application I'd like to develop.

Note that this is just an application - I don't need high graphics throughput or any of that game oriented kind of stuff. Just basic controls and user interface/data storage.

Does anyone have info to share with a staggering blind man?

[Savant]

Actually, never mind. I should have searched the web before asking ... many people have already filled this niche. Sorry!