Games Have Ring of Success

More on the mobile gaming space. The San Antonio Express-News writes about the growing market for games on cell phones. The article cites some user anecdotes and figures from Verizon, JamDat and Infospace.

According to Seamus McAteer at M:Metrics "The number of people downloading games onto their cell phone has risen 25 percent this year. Consumers download around 6 million games each month in the United States."

Not sure if the below is a misquote, but I must take issue with these comments from a Verizon spokesperson:

Driving the popularity of mobile phone gaming are the newer phones that can display games with Sony Playstation quality, said Jimmy Duvall, Verizon Wireless' spokesman in Dallas. The video-enabled mobile phones also have longer battery life, bigger color screens, stereo sound systems and 3-D graphics. "The games are just more fun to play and they are more entertaining," Duvall said.

I think few would argue that the current cell phone gaming experience is far from console-like quality due to the limitations of screen size, memory and navigation controls. I don't think this will change for a while unless manufacturers design handsets specifcally for gaming such as the N-Gage, which is a whole different issue....