Jason shared some interesting figures about mobile gaming. The demographics for the mobile gaming industry is a surprisingly 51% male, and 49% female with an average age of 35 years old. Some of the people are more hard-core gamers who are used to playing with traditional platforms. Others are casual players who tend to play in a hardcore manner, primarily with their more popular casual titles including 'Bejeweled' and several card games.

Mobile gaming, Jason explained, is still an immature market. The goal is to keep mobile gaming maturing with the rest of the industry. Gearing their premise towards the more popular online and multiplayer games is one way of solving this. Some of the other solutions where explained as Jason focused on a few key points of the mobile gaming market. He explained how some of their most important goes were 'Exceeding Customer Expectation', 'Make Every Gamer a Repeat Gamer', and 'Buzz'.

Exceeding Customer Expectations

One of the main worries that Sprint/Nextel had was whether or not they could exceed the often unrealistically high expectations of the average gamer. He explained about the fact that brand names will set a higher expectation for a game, often leaving room for a bigger letdown if the game didn't live up to it's name. Some shocking statistics explained that between two very similar games, a generic one would generally receive higher praise from a gamer than a branded game. In the example provided, the generic game placed at the fifteenth most popular, 88 places ahead of the brand name game. Sprint/Nextel is focusing on how to rely more on quality than on a name mainly due to the fact that over 55% of gamers will stop playing due to lack of interest and 31% will stop playing due to quality issues.

M.E.G.A.R.C. (Make Every Gamer a Repeat Gamer)

Another main point that Jason focused on was the goal to make gamers stay gamers. He explained that it's a lot easier to keep older customers than to try to make new ones. One of the ways to do this is to look to the gamer for feedback instead of relying on professional reviewers. They feel that reviews from a large sampling of players are a lot more reliable than one review from one reviewer. In one such case C-Net reviewed a game at a surprisingly high score of 8.9 while the customers who played it rated it a much lower 6.1. In their opinion, they need to generally view from the point of view of the customer, since they're the ones who are paying for the service. One of Sprint/Nextel's main goals for Mobile Gaming is to predominantly make decisions based on customer opinions.

Buzz

The final goal that Jason focused on was "generating buzz", which is commonly referred to as "viral marketing". What is it? Simply, it's relying on gamers to tell their friends about cool games. In a poll they cited, 21% of gamers heard about games from friends while 74% heard about it from the carrier. Ideally, they would like to see these numbers go up.

He also cited 'churn', which simply translates to how fast people put aside their games. Based on the player rating, the percentage of churn went down from 17% at a rating of four, to less than 12% at a rating of nine. What this shows is that the higher a game is rated by the players, the longer players will keep the game.

While Mobile gaming is already a fairly popular medium for today's developers, it still isn't regarded as "mainstream". In general, people don't buy phones for games but Sprint/Nextel is trying to become a company that focuses on entertainment as well as communication. While people enjoy mobile gaming, it's a lot harder to grab their attention with the lack of boxes and the limited info available. However, Sprint/Nextel's focus on quality instead of quantity is refreshing.