Women hold future of mobile gaming
They are key to turning industry into billion-dollar business, executives say
Robin Taylor grew up playing marathon nights of Crazy Eights, backgammon, and chess with her parents. Today when the 45-year-old Brockton mother of six can spare a moment, she loads a round of solitaire on her BlackBerry phone.
``I just want to keep my mind going," Taylor said. ``I do 10 things at a time."
Cellphone solitaire doesn't take the 100 hours that full-fledged electronic fantasy games can require, but cellphone carriers and game publishers are betting that those five minutes could turn gaming on cellphones and PDAs into a billion-dollar industry. While the action-heavy console world of shooter games and buxom babe warriors appeals to many men, women are driving about two-thirds of mobile gaming revenue by playing classics like Tetris and Mahjong.
Women make up 59 percent of all consumers who play games on cellphones, according to Parks Associates , a research firm. And they drive more than 60 percent of the revenue in almost every genre of mobile games, according to research firm Telephia Inc . The exception is in action and adventure, where men are the chief players.
Game marketers say the cellphone's ubiquity and casual nature make mobile gaming popular among women, who are less likely to shell out several hundred dollars for a console like the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox . Some mobile games are free. Others can cost from $3 to $9, and the payment model varies widely. Some games require a one - time payment or subscription.
``The console is about people who come home from work and stay up until 3 a.m. shooting things or killing people," said Jason Spero, vice president of marketing for mobile game company Digital Chocolate . ``But on the phone, people play for two to five minutes at a time. You have totally different design parameters, and it's much more mass-market because everybody's got it in their pocket."
Several of the top mobile games are vintage arcade titles like Pac-Man, so users already know the rules. By comparison, large-scale fantasy games can call for hefty strategy guides explaining the minutiae of imaginary worlds and can take days of uninterrupted playing for the most experienced gamers to win. For now, simple classics like Tetris, Bejeweled , and Mahjong top the mobile gaming charts.
``There's a zero learning curve. If you can become addicted to it within the first couple minutes, then it's successful," said Scott Rubin, vice president of sales and marketing at Namco Networks America Inc ., part of gaming and entertainment giant Namco Bandai Holdings Inc.
The surge in women playing mobile games raises new prospects for a gaming industry long adjusted to targeting teenage and young adult males. As the technology advances, game designers are debating whether the medium will remain a secondary sales platform for hawking the most popular Xbox, PlayStation, or Nintendo titles or mature into something completely different. Mobile gaming could bring in $1.2 billion by 2010, up from $294 million last year, according to the Boston-based research firm Yankee Group .
But analysts say the platform has several hurdles to overcome, including the tiny screen and subpar graphics -- compared with the console experience -- as well as unwieldy keypads meant for dialing numbers, not directing Tetris blocks. Also, when consumers surf for games in their mobile carriers' wireless store, they aren't given much information about a game beyond one - line description s .
For now, established companies like Namco and Electronic Arts are mostly dusting off staple games like SimCity and Ms. Pac-Man and repackaging them as two-minute diversions on mobile phones.
But smaller firms have emerged focusing on building content from scratch.
Digital Chocolate plans to launch a game called The Hook-Up: Ava Flirting , for $2.99 a month, in which users create avatars that they send to virtual bars and clubs to flirt with the online personas of other players. LimeLife Inc. , a company based in Silicon Valley that produces mobile content exclusively for women, has a text-messaging service that sends fashion tips and horoscopes and sells games like Girls' Night Out Solitaire and Hollywood Hangman .
LimeLife's chief executive, Kristin McDonnell , said women have always been avid players of puzzles, trivia, and card games and that computer gaming started in the 1980s serving an even female-male base. But when three-dimensional graphics emerged in the 1990s, the industry began focusing overwhelmingly on men with shooter games like Duke Nukem , she said.
Games became rife with scantily dressed, gun-toting female characters, which has turned women off, she said.
``I roll my eyes, especially when you see one holding a sword and wearing a leather thong," said Phaedra Boinodiris, who founded WomenGamers.com .
Kim-Mai Cutler can be reached at kcutler@globe.com. 