Jason Ford, VP of Strategy and Planning at Namco acted as mediator for a panel discussion on the mobile games community. The panel consisted of Misha Lyalin, CEO and Founder of Reaxion, Steve Hoffman, Chief Operating Officer and Studio Head at Zannel Inc. (which stands for zillions of channels!), and Alan Sobol from Digital Chocolate.
Conference Notes:
Are mobile communities necessary?
What made the YouTube community happen? Ease and utility. They made it super easy for the general population to post video content online, and with no filtering process.
What would be the ideal for the mobile business to grow? Should it allow for communities like the internet has social software communities? In the long term: yes, there is a huge community out there!
Quality is going to be the driver. You have to start off with smaller communities. A community can grow and advance when you have the quality. Publishers have to provide it, and the carrier has to spread the word.
Who manages the multiple communities? Should it come from the carrier or at the publisher level?
Build within the separate carriers and the communities will grow from there. One danger in this is unsolicited spam, and who need more of that?
Should the carrier have more control? This could potentially stifle innovation.
Like the massive community of the internet, it comes down to the survival of the fittest.
What's going to make the difference? How people interact, connect, get to know each other - the casual audience. What drives the social communities, like mySpace, is the utility. It's how we keep tabs of what our social online networks are doing. It drives the user.
The audience, the users have to be the ones who invest. Once that happens, the building of the communities will evolve. Back to the YouTube example: You watch an episode of Ask A Ninja, for instance, you love it, naturally, and then YOU want to be person who shares that with your friends.
Here's an idea: carriers creating a simple password manager, perhaps a feature that's embedded on the phone, to avoid the hassle of different user names and passwords for different communities and games. We all just want to be one user with one name and one mobile number, don't we?
What's the hook to get people there in the communities? Dating and flirting games would do the trick. After that, it has to be a fun and interactive life.