“Mobile Gaming Market Is Not a Comfortable Place”

Today, on average, one mobile phone is available for almost every person in the world population of 7 billion. Obviously, mobile marketers would leave no stone unturned to leverage this pervasive market.

While low-cost feature phones are used mainly for voice calls and SMS applications, the emerging market of smartphones is opening up myriad opportunities for mobile value-added service providers. And mobile gaming is a potential area for game developing companies.

Sweden-based mobile gaming company MAG Interactive is among the leading players in this segment. The company has not only attracted the worldwide mobile gamers, but it also impressed Nokia Growth Partners that has recently decided to invest in MAG Interactive.

RMN Digital invited Daniel Hasselberg, co-founder and CEO, MAG Interactive to discuss the trends in the mobile gaming market. Here he expresses his views in an exclusive interview with Rakesh Raman, the managing editor of RMN Digital.

Here’s Daniel’s to-the-point response to the questions from RMN Digital.

1. Is mobile gaming market ready for the game vendors to survive comfortably? If yes, which parameters support this fact?

The mobile gaming market is not a comfortable place to be in. You will always need to be at your best and make sure you never take your player community for granted. So anyone that wants to survive or thrive in this market should prepare not to get comfortable.

2. Are mobile games meant for smartphone users only or are they equally entertaining for consumers with low-cost feature phones?

I don’t think that the low-cost feature phones market is very interesting from a mobile game maker’s perspective. Or at least not if you expect to monetize nearly as well as you could from smartphone users.

3. Currently, which type of games are popular among consumers?

Casual games are the most downloaded and most played. Key ingredients are great social media integration, competitiveness amongst the players of the game and constant rewards during game play.

4. What’s MAG Interactive’s unique selling proposition (USP) in the mobile gaming market?

Extremely high quality and a focus on optimizing the user experience for maximum player retention and play time. The total time spent in our word game Ruzzle exceeds 50.000 years which I think is proving my point.

5. What’s MAG Interactive’s business model in terms of revenue generation?

The key driver in our business model is in-game advertising.

6. Which factors will spur the growth of mobile gaming market?

The constant improvement of new phones and of course the great in-flux of new smartphone users. Still a lot of people are out there who haven’t bought their first smartphone.

7. Which factors will hamper the growth of mobile gaming market?

In a few years most people will have a smartphone and that will probably slow down the growth. But I can’t see anything other than that that would turn people’s attention away from their smartphone. The average smartphone user looks at the phone 150 times per day. That says a lot about how integrated it is in people’s lives.

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Daniel Hasselberg (pictured above) is the co-founder and CEO of MAG Interactive.