Flash Lite games: Quality or Quantity?
There´s a lesson to be learned from how mobile Java (J2ME) game market has developed. There´s an overwhelming quantity of available mobile games, and quality of most of these games has been perceived as quite low by the consumers. Of course, there are excellent games, and quality is ever increasing, but the overall impression of the J2ME games are not that good among the consumers. And do always remember, that when a person thinks something is good or awful, the word-of-mouth marketing (how people share their experiences with others, or at least information on what is good or bad) is maybe the strongest marketing message there is. Stop for a minute, and think: when your friend recommends something, you´re more likely to believe him/her. And the same goes for bad things, except the bad news always reach more people than good one.
What went wrong?
Let´s skip the technical difficulties, and concentrate on the real reasons. There has been too much low-quality offering of wireless games, that have been released to consumers. Marketing is a mighty weapon, but not almighty. There was a time when J2ME game demos were widely available to consumers — somehow this practice has diminished (with the advent of high quality wireless games, there has been some increase). The reason? People won´t buy games they don´t like — and the word-of-mouth for the non-quality products is simply catastrophic. You see, playing mobile games still has not reached the “everyone is a player” status. And the people who play first are the early adopters, and most likely perceived as somewhat authoritative on the subject: hence, what they think and say is more meaningful to a fellow man than an ad in any format.
What about Flash Lite games?
Flash Lite hasn´t been sold to device manufacturers or carriers/operators as a platform for games. With Flash Lite 1.0 and 1.1., this is somewhat understandable due to the difficult-ish scripting, although it´s perfectly possible to make good games with older versions of the Flash Lite as well.
This is an advantage, as there is a possibility to prove Flash Lite is a good platform, making good quality games before the hordes of developers arrive at the battlefield. So, not games put together in days, but well designed and thought out games with innovation. But not too much innovation: add a feature or two, or 10% innovation if you want to get mathematical – this is the message given out by game industry in general. Maybe it´s the truth, maybe it´s not.
More on the subject later, including:
- The state of Flash education: tween after tween
- Hordes of Developers: 2 million Flash-able people out there