PreviewLabs

Having talked to many people at Casual Connect, there are two tendencies I wanted to write about. The first one is Smartphone Game Development.

For most portals, the downloadable business is still going strong, but many are trying out the iOS devices (iPhone, iPod, iPad), or are even setting up whole divisions dedicated to iOS development.

Although the iPhone market may seem to be saturated for years already, several players in the casual games industry are just getting started in iOS development.

I see two reasons for this:

1. Casual games are typically played by a female audience, with age over 30 (for more info about this, you can read the Casual Games Market report of 2007, which is now available for free). Many smartphone users are in this age group, as these phones are still expensive for teenagers.
2. The smartphone market still has a lot of growth possibilities; it’s still a minority of people who owns a smart phone, and more affordable smartphones as windows phone 7 and android phones are only starting to be explored by game developers.

With about 100 games submitted to the App Store every day, it’s important to stand out from the crowd. Prototyping surely helps to achieve this. If you want to create a unique selling point in terms of gameplay, it’s important to properly prototype your innovative game mechanics.

We can conclude that a lot of interesting games are coming up for smart phones, including some we prototyped for!