November 14th, 2006 by Pascal Besteboer Posted in Analysis & Editorial | 1 Comment »
As Arjan mentioned in a previous post, I offered myself, as the cheap person I am, to do some guest editorials. Hopefully I can bring some insight into the business side of the "Mobile games scene" (yes I am from those old C64 days that allows me to say words like "scene" and "awesome").
First of all, I’m going to take this opportunity to give you some
information on OrangePixel (I might be cheap, but I’m not stupid!).
Basically we are a small development company that started out in mobile
gaming as most did: writing console style platform games and
shooters. However in the last year we have given alot more thought and
time into understanding what mobile games can and should be, atleast
according to our vision of games and the "casual gamer".
I’m not saying we are making big waves (yet!) but we are certainly
trying out new things with OneThumb games like our RocketBoy, and
Sliderkids games, but also new concepts like Mechanics and Thumb-It,
two games that have unique game design and game-controls that are
designed for mobile gaming.
Besides these new game concepts we are also looking at new
distribution ways, having partnered up with the much hyped Greystripe
for adver-gaming, but also our next project with Chillingo/clickgamers
to bring back the shareware days using ingame micropayment solutions
available on any mobile device be it midp1 or midp2.
Personally I find the mobile industry a very interesting place to be
in at this time. Yes there is alot of money being lost, alot of
negative people and companies, the terrible handsets, and the
unfairness of the big companies and operators, uhm..I really forgot my
point here. Oh yeah, it’s a fun industry to work in…really!
The creativity this platform requires and offers to make interesting
games, the very different audience you are writing your games for
compared to consoles and pc’s, the short development periods that allow
you to create games in a few weeks/months time, the new opportunities
and ideas popping up almost every month, all these things are
interesting enough to not just give up on it!
So from now on I will be making some totally random appearances on
this blog to spawn some of my ideas, brain-garbage, abusive words,
name-calling, and terrible spelling mistakes (I bet Arjan is now
already looking for the "Delete-user account" button).
I’m affraid the new design didn’t come with the delete button… 😉