KEY MOBILE TRENDS: games, developers, app stores, mobile home/living room convergence
Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, EA, Nokia, Samsung, Apple: here's a SWOT exercise for you to do. Picture the game console becoming another victim of the smartphone black hole event horizon: an industry that gets sucked in and merges with the smartphone singularity. There is no chance of escape, so go with the flow.
For most types of family gaming, the pieces are coming together for this scenario. There's the computing power in the latest flagships. There's the living-room connectivity such as Mobile High-Definition Link to support full high def video and 7.1s sound output. There are the software players such as Valve which is enabling Steam on mobile platforms. And, now, according to NVIDIA, mobile graphics power will soon outperform the current generation of game consoles, namely PS3 and Xbox 360.
For the smartphone players, it's time to think about the opportunities for developers and app stores in this scenario. The opportunities for accessories and co-branding. And the partnerships to bring it all home.
Tony Tamasi, NVIDIA Senior VP of Content & Technology: “The PS3 and Xbox 360 are barely more powerful than mobile devices... The next click of mobile phones will outperform [them].”
Power, up. Mobile graphics power grows at an amazing pace.
graph from NVIDIA via tweakpc.de
Mobile Steam. For Valve, mobile doesn't fall on deaf ears.
For those looking to network with Chinese mobile players and understand the market: the kind producers of the Global Mobile Internet Conference 2013 and the extended "G-Trip" contacted me to share a 25% discount code with any readers who might wish to attend. You can register your attendance at http://beijing.thegmic.com/register/ and paste in the following code into the "discount code" section: GMIC-VQ9596MT
GWIC 2013. Be there. And see Tiananmen Square.
