CATEGORY: Marketing

True originality is not always easy to find in social gaming. And many games incorporate ideas from others and “borrow” whole concepts. We at Monkeybin are the first to admit we base our games off of well known game mechanics. But we do not steal someone's game.

Social gaming is essentially the intersection between mobile gaming and social networks; it has become so popular that whole conferences and summits are devoted to it, not to mention a whole host of websites and teams of developers dedicated to pushing its boundaries.

Among the many things that your smartphone is, it’s also a games board; and traditional board games that don’t survive the crossover to the electronic mobile and/or social format may be short-lived. The simple beauty and challenge of the original board games were amongst the first to lend themselves to the electronic format and now, with the rise of the social side of gaming, many of them are as popular as ever and being played across large networks of players.

Nope. That’s not the name of a new Hollywood blockbuster. It’s a fact according to recent studies that have looked at the portion of the mobile gaming market currently being enjoyed on the Android platform.

It seems that many of the mainstays of the entertainment industry have declined in popularity over the past 12 months - but that certainly doesn’t apply to mobile games. They are becoming the new darling of modern entertainment!

Whether you are new to the joys of electronic gaming or have migrated over from portable consoles to mobile handset or tablet gaming, there are a number of ways you can make the whole experience more enjoyable.

Game developers have been riding on the back of a huge boost in social and mobile gaming this year but, as we’ve pointed out before on this blog, the constant question of how to actually run a business from developing games and apps still bugs most of the smaller, independent developers.

I was one of the sceptics when tablet computers were first released, because I couldn’t see too many buying a pricey device that was neither a mobile phone nor a fully-fledged computer. I was underestimating the power of the “mobile” element of tablets – the fact that some of them can fit in an inside jacket pocket or in a handbag or school satchel – which seems to be more important than the limitations I was considering.

If we ran a respected game review site and received emails from game developers about the release of a new app, with an accompanying review or two already written by the developer and a request to cut and paste portions of the review on our site, we would probably feel a bit indignant; even insulted.

El Dorado – the “Lost City of Gold” - eluded the conquistadors and everybody since; many people seem to be searching mobile gaming in the belief that it may actually reside within the sleek confines of an iPad or on a Facebook Wall! What are we talking about you ask? We’re referring to the developers and businesses flocking to mobile gaming because of the opportunities of making a mint quickly.

Such is the glamorous life of app and game developers that we used to have to spend ages playing around with Photoshop, resizing and reformatting images to create the right icons to include in iPads, iPhones and Android-based apps and games. It‘s at times like that you sometimes wonder about getting a real job :-) No more! The Iconimator application does it all for you in a flash.

Global financial turmoil and austerity measures? Rubbish! If people can spend $3 billion worldwide on things like clothing for their in-game avatars then either there’s something seriously imbalanced out there or there is more spare income available than we’re being led to believe. Hang on a second…I just need to harvest some more zombies on my Zombie Farm…brb. Damn – where’s my credit card?

There might be a tasty new sandwich on the menu soon that has mobile gamers salivating, because it can make mobile gaming more like a full console experience. The high uptake of smartphones has spawned a whole new band of people who enjoy playing games in short bursts on the go – as we can see every day as we walk down the street, wait for a train, sit in the doctor’s waiting room or take a breather in the shopping mall. Well, some like to play games at home too – and that’s where Ice Cream Sandwich comes in.

Mobile apps and gaming have become vehicles not only for people to get a more enjoyable, entertaining and informative experience from their handsets, but also for companies to market their products and services to their audiences.

Mobile gaming has certainly become big business, with sales reaching $5.6 billion last year, but the question remains whether mobile game marketing represents a good return on investment for companies developing games in the hope of increasing sales.

Here we look at a few positive examples that may help us answer that question.

With the release of the iPhone 4S, which we reviewed for you a couple of weeks ago, we are starting to wonder whether mobile gaming is going back to the future.

The upcoming release of the latest iPhone and the expected impact it is going to have on its users – turning more and more unsuspecting, innocent phone/camera/chat users into mobile gamers – is occupying a lot of blog post inches.

Here we ask whether we are seeing an effect not seen since the 1990s, when mobile gaming devices burst on to the market?

Our earlier post this week covered the impending release of the Amazon Kindle Fire in November; here we look at it from the game developers’ angle and see what the Fire will spark in gaming circles.

As we mentioned, the Kindle Fire seems on first glance…and second glance, actually… to be a “turbo-charged reader” rather than a gaming device, so despite its great price of $199 ($300 less than the iPad), is it about to offer up more opportunities for mobile gamers, and therefore developers?

Unless you’ve been locked in your mother’s basement with nothing more than a cup of tea and a copy of Jumpship Thrust Control to keep you company, you probably heard that Amazon announced the release of the Kindle Fire this week; that’s their version of the tablet computer first pioneered by Apple with the iPad, and it’s coming out in the US on Nov 15th.

Below we look at how the new tablet shapes up against the iPad and explore their key differences to see if they are really operating in exactly the same area.

In the second post later this week we will look at effects of the Kindle Fire release on the tablet/handset/gaming/apps industry as a whole and specifically on game developers.

We hear a LOT of chatter about how gaming on our mobile handsets is going to replace handheld gaming entirely, but is the sound of the death knell for consoles a bit premature?

After all, Sony don’t think that’s the case, as they get ready to launch their Vita portable PlayStation later this year.

You would have had to be asleep for the past year to not notice the rise of mobile gaming on handsets.

That kid next to you on the bus frantically pressing his iPhone; the guy over in the corner of the café moving his iPad around at funny angles; the girl in the train station looking in disgust at her Android. They’re all a part of the mobile gamer clan and it’s on the rise.