Why Do Venture Capitalists Love Mobile Gaming? 30
Thanks to the San Jose Biz Journal for its article discussing the boom in funding for mobile phone game creators and publishers. The story notes that venture capitalists "made six gaming investments totaling $50 million in all of 2003. In the second quarter of 2004 alone, there were five [largely mobile gaming] deals totaling $86 million." Apparently: "Java-enabled handset sales tripled in 2003 to 95.5 million units and sales of Qualcomm's Brew platform reached 11.6 million in 2003, up from 3.5 million the prior year." Although "mobile gaming is young enough that it's cheap to produce a lot of games and see which ones stick", do you think these large investments are going to pay off?
Re:Simple. (Score:2, Informative)
Unfortunately for Joe End-user this ideas's slightly incorrect. The networks regularly come to us for our new game and want it to run on XYZ new handsets, where X is a decent piece of kit and Y and Z are devices that could barely outthink a wristwatch.
They just want to have something new to sell with whatever they've got 50,000 units of rotting in a warehouse. Technical specs rarely appear to enter into the marketing picture.
Re:Don't play (Score:3, Informative)
1) The Gameboy has a headphone socket (or failing that, a volume knob)
2) Its screen (while not great) is bigger than your average mobile phone's, which makes all the difference for games.
3) It has controls especially designed for games