I am sorry to Patrick Mörk from Glu, I used his title from last weeks 2nd Central European Mobile Media Conference (wow this is long, they should think about a shortcut). Or maybe the title should be Mobile games market - still kicking, yet another one bites the dust - as Ojom, the Jamba owned mobile games development unit announced closure effective beginning of this month. Nothing unexpected really. The Ojom games always lacked some bigger thought, and even though they had great brands (Duke Nukem being my personal favorite), they weren’t really capable in turning it in something working great. But where is the market heading? Is the market in sort of a down-trend, or what’s going on?

Cost issue = more handsets = more costs

Mobile game development used to be an easy thing. You ported for Nokia S40, S60, S30 if you were lucky on memory size, then to Sony Ericsson and a couple other phones, and you were done. Today, you have tons of screen sizes, handset specific issues, complications, key, rules, verified programs, etc. Many of the developers tried to do something about it, and raise costs - but the issue is the market didn’t raise accordingly to the costs.

Handset were just the beginning. By the trend I am seeing, the single lifecycles of good B games (anything under TOP10) used to be maybe 6 - 9 months. Today, we are looking at results from 2 - 5 months, where the game has to make its shine, or go away and make space for more.

Less is more

In this case, the less developers there and the less games they make, the more revenue comes to the big guys like EA, Gameloft, Glu, Hands-on, and others, who have mostly grown their revenues over the past 3 years. This means revenue doesn’t dissappear = it is there, just not where some of the smaller ones would want it to be.

Examples of recent failures

Ojom is the most recent one, closing down their mobile game development just days ago.

TelcoGames, the very recent one, announcing administration just weeks ago, really causing the industry to chat about it. But I guess it was only the way it was done.


In-Fusio, of the more recent, despite announcing they are getting more licenses, the companies looks like its closing, even though it might get out of it through an acquisition (previously I thought it was bought by Zenops).

Overloaded, slightly an older one. Mocondi got ahold of this great brand, I still think one of the largest potential brands in the mobile games space, but nobody really was there to manage it. Too bad on this lost opportunity.

The trend is definately moving forward to the big publishers, so let’s hope they let some of the smaller guys in their doors.

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