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Cell Phone Games - Market or Mirage?

Posted by Zonk on from the big-market dept.

Rimbo writes "One popular view of the cellphone gaming industry is that it's the place where they exile people who couldn't cut it in the console and PC game industry. The other popular point of view is that with the huge volume of handsets everywhere, it's a market primed to explode. Today's Hit from the Wireless Pipe takes a look at some little-noticed details of the buyout that suggest that this is not the sign of the market maturing that many want it to be." Relatedly, that buyout was finally approved by the Jamdat Shareholders this past weekend.

1 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Bring out your dead by SoCalFatboy · · Score: 2, Informative
    If you want to know anything more about the game, you're out six bucks. If you want to download a lot of games to find the gem, you're going to be dirt poor and playing a lot of crappy games.
    Now take a look at some of Jamdat's top sellers: Bejeweled, Tetris, Bowling, Solitaire, Doom RPG. All of them existing properties. All of them known games.

    Amen, it's a money sink. DO NOT buy the unlimted version (usually 3x monthly cost). You won't be playing it more than 3 months. On my current phone I tried "unknown" games.

    EA Madden 2006: Gamepad to numberpad? Yeah, right. I could play Intellivision football with more precision.

    Ys 1: Best game I've played so far, but that's not saying much. At least I could move my character reliably. But good luck getting more than 10 hours of gameplay.

    Jamdat MLB 2005: It looks like baseball. You can control the location of your pitch. The rest is feels like you're just pretending to play.

    Stick to Tetris and Bejeweled. Are those worth $700M?