Develop Conference In Brighton - Day 1

Location-based Games €“ Where Are We Now?

In this afternoon session, Heather Stark, a roving analytics expert spoke of the successes and failures so far, in terms of location-based gaming. After a quick history lesson detailing how people have always facilitated devices for game playing, Stark stated that there are now somewhere in the region of 1.5 billion smartphones worldwide. Stark talked about the successes in this seemingly, though apparently not so much, niche genre, games like Ingress, Google€™s free to play effort, not to mention geocaching.com, Four Square and Zombie Run. The latter being formed after a kickstarter campaign that initially asked for $12,000 though ended up well exceeding the requested amount. The penetration of such games is an immense success, though they often seem to struggle in terms of monetisation. There appears to be no one making a fortune from this style of gaming. Some signs of life suggest well-reviewed efforts like Shadow Cities might have more luck as up until now, the trend for such games appears to be to have a couple of months of decent sales then to drift away, not catching on, virally or otherwise, with some suggestions that many people were just playing such games in their homes, not really as intended. The future of location-based gaming appears unclear, with Stark estimating that sponsored apps will get busier and that there€™s room for a middle ground between games of little interaction, where you just check-in, and games where the interaction is quite intense. With the information available to somewhat creepy apps like Mixer and Highlight and the invention of such products as Google Glass, its quite possible that location-based gaming will have a strong future, though in quite what way remains uncertain. That€™s all for today, more tomorrow when hopefully there will be some exciting PS4 information as well as reporting from the exhibition.