An Exploration of the Mobile Gaming Ecosystem from Developers’ Perspective - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 73

but, at the same time, the enhanced competition among games in any of
these platforms gives more relevance to the role of marketing and advertis-
ing and, consequently, shifts the market power back from developers to
publishers and platform owners . 14
The implications for developers have been summarized by Holzer and
Ondrus (2011) as easier access to consumers, lower development and dis-
tribution costs and higher customization costs. The author would add
to this scenario lower entry barriers for developers and less bargaining
power (both technically and business model) for them with regard to plat-
form owners.
As a consequence, there are both signs of consolidation of mobile game
development studios and publishers and an increasing fragmentation and
decrease in the size of the development studios. The economies of scale sought
by consolidation start to be displayed as some companies appear consistently
across rankings (Electronic Arts and Gameloft are the main examples) and
some others are the target of acquisitions by relevant entertainment-oriented
players. 15 At the same time, there are also some small companies or even
individual highly successful developers (Team17, Firemint or Lupis Labs are
notorious examples in the Android platform), which proves the low entry
barriers case. Along the same lines, the Game Developer Research 2009-
2010 survey noted that experienced developers are increasingly heading their
own small studies or have begun games on their own.
Also relevant for developers, a number of big players are crafting their
own strategies into the domain (examples are Disney, Microsoft, Sony-Eric-
sson and Apple). Most of them include building an in-house development
team for mobile gaming. This team can be created from inner knowledge
already existing in the company and/or hiring/acquiring external knowl-
edge. If this becomes the usual case for mobile games development, the
precedents in the console industry indicate that in-house developer teams
become favoured at the expense of publishing partners.
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES
FOR MOBILE GAME DEVELOPERS
There is no easy guide to explore upcoming challenges and opportunities.
In the following, besides the discussion in preceding sections, the author
uses a compilation of previous studie s 16 on some main mobile content and
applications segments (content in general, advertising, television, search,
social networks, previous analysis of gaming), which included consulta-
tions with industry experts, to select those that appear as more relevant for
mobile gaming. Their order can be discussed but there is a general agree-
ment about their relevance.
First, it can be simply concluded that the growth of the mobile gaming
market in the next years will be fundamentally based on the increasing