We presented at a conference a few weeks ago and we received our first bit of press. To give you some context, we presented right after a panel on mobile gaming including Capcom, Telus Mobility, Nokia, and Hands-On mobile, amongst others. Their message was largely that mobile gaming is stagnant, sales are flat, and no one seems to have any ideas how about to stimulate interest.

From the blog post:

The panel itself didn’t really have any solutions to offer but, as a nice dose of serendipity, one of the demos in the DemoCamp session that followed this panel was by a new mobile startup looking to help bridge the viral gap and get users playing collaborative games on cell phones, regardless of device or provider – Called Social Deck they’re looking to launch in the middle of 2008.

They had a working demo and the premise looks sound. Initially they’re targeting iPhones, Blackberrys and (wisely I think) tying into Facebook so gameplay won’t be limited to mobile devices only. At this time they’re developing their own content but during the Q&A people were already poking around for opportunities to push existing IP into the app.

A system like this could be just what the industry needs to push a little of that viral mojo into the mobile device market.

http://wirelessnorth.ca/2008/03/28/mobile-gaming-desperately-seeking-viral/

Welcome to the official socialDeck blog! Woe be unto the web company that doesn’t have a blog these days, so here we are following suit. I’ll be posting updates about the company and our progress here, along with any other interesting technology tidbits we come across.

What’s the problem we’re trying to solve? Good question. The problem is that mobile gaming is largely stagnant in North America, with around 6MM-7MM games sold last month (according to a panel on mobile gaming at ICE). When you look at the 200MM handsets in North America that’s clearly a drop in the bucket. There are a few reasons that mobile gaming hasn’t taken off:

• The games are B-rate ports of existing games: . If I want to play madden, or gears of war, I’m going to play it on my console. I don’t want to play a stripped down version of madden on my phone. It just doesn’t translate.
• No model for viral adoption: If I like a game on the web I’ll send my friends a link. There isn’t a convenient way to do that on the phone. Even if I could send them a link it would be carrier and phone specific. A lot of this goes back to the whole walled garden issue, which I’m not going to rehash.
• People don’t want to pay for original content: People don’t want to pay $5 for a title they don’t know. However, the titles that they do know are crappy ports of existing games (see first point). So people end up paying $5 for mobile Madden, which is a disappointment, and then they never buy another mobile game.

We’re building a platform that bridges the gap between mobile and web gaming. Obviously a platform isn’t very interesting without applications on top of it, so we’re launching a game on top of said platform. There are a few characteristics that we think make our approach interesting:

• Let mobile users play their friends on the web: This is the corner stone of what we’re doing; interoperability between web and mobile games. This helps to get around the issue of carrier/phone fragmentation. If your buddy doesn’t have a phone that supports our game, no problem, she can play you with the Facebook application. We believe that leveraging your existing social network, and the large penetration of social networking sites can drive viral adoption of mobile games.
• Build casual, turn-based games: We think that this type of game works best on the phone. The model for gaming on the phone that we’re looking at is “hey, I have 5 minutes to kill at the bus station, let me open up my phone and make a move in chess”. The next time you have another 5 minutes to kill, do the same thing.
• Build multi-player games: The phone is about communication. So why aren’t the games more social? Playing my friends is way more interesting then trying to beat my own high score.
• Free: As in beer. Well, ad-supported, but who’s counting?

So that’s what we’re up to. Stay tuned …