Today I’d like to take a look at a Gamasutra article about the casual mobile… game… mar… ket… zzzzzzzz.

How do you succeed with original IP in the license/generic-heavy cellphone game biz? Vivendi’s Palley discusses the trials and tribulations of creating Surviving High School…

Zzzzzzzzzzzzz…

a game that sold over 10 million downloadable ‘episodes’ since launch.

!

All right, you have my attention.

This is the problem with discussing the casual game market. The moderate-to-hardcore set, myself included, just doesn’t give a damn about it. The offerings are always some compromised copy of a more successful game, as the Gamasutra article says. Even if the actual cell phone hardware has matured to the point where it can support a good game, I’m not interested in playing Prince of Persia: The Tiny Knockoff when I could be playing the real thing.

That’s the attitude, at least. With the introduction of iPhone games, we may be seeing some products that are robust enough to draw even the serious crowd.

But that’s beside the point. Clearly the mobile game market is already serious business. And since that’s a space we here at Kwanzoo are in, I should probably shut up and pay attention.

Meanwhile, Miao, Kan and She second-guessed the High School Chronicles title. There was nothing wrong with High School, but Chronicles sounded tedious. This was dangerous on a seriously impoverished merchandising and marketing platform like the download deck, where well-branded shovelware beats a superior game with a lame or inscrutable title almost every time.

Lesson one: Catchy title beats good game. Got it.

Centerscore reluctantly put itself on the market, after reaching the conclusion that staying independent was a losing proposition. The studio simply couldn’t match the big publishers’ sale and marketing muscle, and carriers were starting to freeze the smaller players out entirely.

Lesson two: No use being independent.

In the mobile games industry, the usual causal relationship between marketing and sales is turned on its head; instead of seeking out products they’ve seen in advertisements, consumers tend to buy whatever is at the top of the deck. Thus, truly effective marketing targets the carrier operatives in charge of distribution, who are the publishers’ real customers. The trick is to get those reps, who are constantly bombarded by requests, to pay attention.

Lesson three: Sell to someone who isn’t actually going to play the game.

Whoof. Man, I’m not exactly fired up here. High School Chronicles actually looks like a solid game, but the creators got hammered by the idiosyncrasies of the mobile game market at every turn.

Just as importantly, Centerscore was aware of its limitations. It stayed independent just long enough to produce its magnum opus, after a long iterative process that probably would have been squashed under a publisher’s supervision. It then traded in some of its operational independence for the resources that would take that product to the next level.

Translation: The big publisher they needed to be owned by never would have green-lighted the product that became their blockbuster in the first place.

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