Smartphone Games “Front and Center” at Tokyo Game Show 2011
Wired has an overview of what’s going at Tokyo Game Show – annual exposition of Japanese videogames – this year: smartphone and tablet games are “dominating” the show floor, whilst long-time publishers of regular console games decided not to have a booth.
In their place, dominating a massive section in the center aisle of the show floor, are smartphones and tablets: iPhones, Android phones, PlayStation phones and all manner of Japan-only devices with keys that easily let the country’s millions of texters type out entire novels’ worth of kanji messages. Cellphone games have been part of Tokyo Game Show for more than a decade, but until this year, the casual time-killers lurked on the periphery of the show, in the backs of the booths, attracting few onlookers.
The impressive growth of the mobile gaming industry is no secret to those who have been keeping an eye on the explosion of “app stores” through 2010 and 2011. But Wired makes a good point in its TGS coverage: there’s one niche of gamers mobile games have failed to attract, and that’s hardcore gamers. The “regular console games” that have dominated the Tokyo Games Show in the past years, and which are struggling to impress on iPhones, iPads, and Android handsets.
One challenge for Gree and other mobile gamemakers: Creating mobile games that appeal to hard-core gamers as well as casual players. Gree President and CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka noted the dilemma.
“I was just walking around the show floor,” he said at a press briefing Thursday, “and what I thought while I was looking around was, ‘Console games seem much more interesting than social games. They’re more cool.’”
Gree, for instance, is the company that bought OpenFeint and announced a CEO replacement this week. The issue is a complex one: Angry Birds is selling millions of copies (350 million to date), yet hardcore gamers still can’t find proper mobile counterparts for their favorite PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii games. Big companies like EA are reinventing themselves with strong mobile offerings, and revenue speaks clearly.
I believe the scarcity of “hardcore games” or lack thereof is more related to the youth of these mobile platforms, as well as ongoing technological advancements. Lets’s see what the A6 will bring.
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