At this point, the gaming industry is split between two incredibly large markets: the core gaming community that focuses on portable and home console gaming, and the casual smart phone users who spend plenty of money downloading and purchasing app game content.
There is no doubt that the two industries are generating plenty of revenue for game developers, but are the two markets starting to creep into each other’s territory?
The issue here is that gaming, whether casual or not, is still gaming. Many casual players find themselves wanting more and start venturing into the more hard core titles while core gamer find the assortment of casual titles available in the mobile phone industry to be quite entertainingly light.
Sony just recently aired an advertisement with the new “MarcusPSP” series (which is patterned after the Kevin Butler ads they released) to promote core gaming values to more people. The ad stresses a very important point, even with impressive technology on smart phones, no developer has yet to make a truly impressive title (hence the ad reference ‘for the big boys’). Even Microsoft’s recently released initial list of XBL Service titles for Windows Phone 7 is downright lackluster.
Of course, Sony is also pointing out a very important factor, that people are spending plenty of money on casual titles. After all, the whole point of the ad is to encourage people to spend just as much on games –but on the ‘right’ games. Naturally, general phone users would still stick to apps, but core gamers have more to gain from the PSP.
With rumors of Google and Sony working together to develop an Android PSP2, it is quite possible that Sony intends to take charge of both markets with a single device -though this brings up one interesting little fear that hard core players have: a time when incoming calls and messages will literally interrupt your game.
Tags: android-psp2, Apple, Apps, games, google-android, Sony-Ericsson, Sony-PSP-Phone, Windows-Phone-7