Mobile Gaming Evolution: From Snake to Mobile Social Gaming

Do you still remember the first mobile game you ever played? And do you still know when you’ve played it the first time? If I remember right it was 2004 (about 5 or 6 years ago) with my Nokia 6310i. I was playing Snake and it reminded me of the first video game.

At the same time while mobile games were monochrome, published on screens and without any thrill millions of people were already playing highly sophisticated and complex video games on consoles and computers.
One group of players was playing complex video games on consoles or on the PC. Another group are casual player. Which means a faster gaming experience, short games, an easy to understand game concept and a fast learning curve within the games and most importantly the possibility to play various games without getting new CD-ROMs or game modules for the PC or console.
The answer was browser games. That’s the reason for the success of the numerous browser game portals (e.g. www.king.com or www.winner.com). Another reason for the success of such portals is the social gaming aspect. Players can play against each other (even for small amounts of money or virtual currencies), they can compare their high-scores and they can communicate.
Fast-forward to today. A mobile phone has turned into a mobile computer as well as into a mobile game console. The iPhone is just the beginning of a paradigm-shift.

I got my first iPhone a year ago and I was amazed about the screen-flow, the graphics, the application and…about all the interesting casual games available on the AppStore. To be honest I became a frequent casual gamer and I started to evaluate this particular market.

Today there are thousands of single player casual mobile games on the Apple AppStore. Some of the games are from large publishers but most of them are from very creative independent games developers.

Compared to the browser games with its social features the mobile games were still single player casual games.
Wasn’t it Nokia who claimed “connecting people”. Sure – if a person is calling another person both are connected. And they are connected with their mobile phones. Lets translate this to the gaming behavior. If one gamer plays a game wouldn’t it be much more thrilling to play against (asynchronous or synchronous) an opponent.
The main task of a game developer is to create the best gamer experience, thrilling games and screen-flows. It’s not his turf to run a transaction server in order to connect numerous gamers with each other.
Well, this task is been solved.

Scoreloop is exactly providing all the functions and features to the game developers. Scoreloop has a back-end-server which processes all challenges, keeps the high-scores, provides game stats to the developers, etc.  The game developer is integrating a lean SDK (software development kit) into his games (developers feedback: “took me an hour”) and his former single player game has been transformed into a social game.
Scoreloop launched its service in April. Only one month later game developers are launching new games with Scoreloop inside on a weekly basis.
I became a big fan of connected mobile games (phones are to connect with people!), some simple data streams out (high-scores, etc) AND links into existing social networks are actually likely to activate a lot of the potential in there.
Single User Mobile Gaming shifted to Social Gaming!