Author Archive

VASland2006, meet your consumers!

January 4th, 2007 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Analysis & Editorial | No Comments »

Buongiorno took the liberty of releasing their anual VASland report for 2006. Looking at the press release, the report devides our consumer base into three types of consumers which is beyond popular terms like early adapters, casual gamers or even male vs. female.

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Acme: South-East Asian Games Top 10

January 3rd, 2007 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Analysis & Editorial | No Comments »

Acme Mobile released their top ten of best selling games along the Southeast Asian region, based on sales of their amob.com portal. The range of best selling games has a remarkable low number of licensed mobile games.

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IDC: US houses 50 million players by 2010

January 3rd, 2007 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Analysis & Editorial | No Comments »

Research firm IDC has questioned it’s consumer base about mobile gaming and turned up with a lot of interesting news. From the US consumers they questioned, 11% bought a game in Q3 2006. This is a whole lot better then the average 5% we hear from other reports. On average the consumers are below 24 and spent on average $ 13 on mobile gaming. According to IDC, 75%+ was for one off payments, meaning subscriptions still don’t have a big ground in the US. By the end of the decade, IDC predicts 1/3 will be subscription based though. The price of subscription based games will rise more then $ 2,50. The fine details can be read here.

PG’s 10 trends for 2007

January 2nd, 2007 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Analysis & Editorial | No Comments »

The guys at PocketGamer might have taken a good look at the forecasts we published earlier as they published their top 10 trends for 2007. The big number one is of course ad funded mobile games, but their list features surprises like LBS gaming as well.

In-Fusio vs. Microsoft

January 2nd, 2007 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Brand Licensing | No Comments »

It sounds like the latest games, but we just got an email about a legal battle that’s about to start between the French and US giants. In-Fusio openly accused Microsoft for seeking a way to terminate a $ 2 million licensing deal on the Xbox smash chart breaker Halo.

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Happy 2007

December 30th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Analysis & Editorial | 1 Comment »

I will post this now as I will not come round to doing it the coming 2 days. On behalf of all editors on The Mobile Games Blog, I wish you all a great 2007. As most of you probably remember our 2007 forecast editorial a few weeks back, we have pasted below the forecasts that came in after the publishing date.

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Breakpoint merges with MNI

December 30th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | No Comments »

Our friends at QuicklyBored report the merger between Polish developer Breakpoint and Polish media and telecoms group MNI. MNI has purchased 57% of Breakpoint valued at

AT&T buys Bellsouth and Cingular

December 30th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | No Comments »

AT&T announced the acquisition of Bellsouth and Cingular in the US. The new combination will have a value of up to $ 220 billion and will be the biggest in the market. AT&T announced on a mini-site the transformation of both Bellsouth and Cingular to the AT&T brand. Cingular will be re-branded early 2007 and AT&T hopes to have both networks connected before that time. This acquisition looks a lot like the acquisition of Telfort by KPN in The Netherlands earlier this year. However except for joining the networks, KPN left Telfort mostly the way it is, making it purely an acquisition to stabilize it’s market possition.

Frengo receives $ 2.3 million funding

December 30th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Companies & M&A | No Comments »

MoCoNews reports social mobile gaming firm Frengo received a $ 2.3 million funding from Index Ventures Management, Khosla Ventures and others. Frengo is based in Redwood City, California. At this moment, Frengo is aimed purely at SMS games, play for fun and play to win. Nice detail is the ‘Beta’ in their company logo which is a bit strange for a service that is operating fully on a commercial business model.

InfoSpace merger around the corner?

December 28th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in People | No Comments »

InfoSpace’s head of mobile Stephen Davis is leaving the company. After InfoSpace choose to depart from consumer mobile content, there was not much work left. The rumours about an acquisition are growing stronger and stronger as moves like these obviously fuel these.