Gaming: Mobile Gaming market is evolving

Nintendo DS line of products and Sony PSPs have been the major players in the mobile gaming category. With the introduction of iPhone and and the improvement in hardware and rendering engines recently, mobile gaming seems to be taking a paradigm shift. The mobile gamers, who used to be just hard core games on the move are being replaced with casual gamers and occasional hard core gamers. The run away success of games like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Fruit Ninja and many others can vouch for this emerging trend.
The transition was so prominent that the American boss of Nintendo, Reggie Fils-Aime claimed Apple as one of its major competition and not Microsoft or Sony.

Sony had an impressive device in its portfolio with PSP2000, but lost its way with the release of PSP Go without adequate backward compatibility and title support. The rumored Playstation Phone from Sony that merges the touch screen smart phone world powered by Android and the gaming system of Sony sounds like an obvious winner. This will only be certain, if the device is capable of adapting to the casual games like Angry Birds and hard core games like God of War. This device may definitely have to go the route of PSP Go, with lack of UMD support but support some way of providing backward compatibility or exclusive titles to attract the hard core gamers.

Microsoft's recently platform launch of Windows Phone 7 also goes along similar lines, by integrating with the XBOX Live heavily and providing access to real-time access to the XBOX world and the casual games of XBOX Live available from the phone itself.

The major shift needs to come from the pricing strategy, as the casual games do not sell for $25 and above any more. Most of the hit games have ranged from being Free to maximum of $5. Even the games that are distributed by studios like EA, are sold for $5 and available for 99 cents when on sale (lot of times).

With all this comes the market for accessories and the manufacturers have started seeing the trend here. People who are stuck with the recent touch screen devices and play games of it, feel the need for tactile feedback and there are alternatives available to solve those needs. One such product is from TenOneDesign (http://tenonedesign.com/fling.php) that provides a quick and simple solution to get analog controls for some of those games that try to simulate pushing buttons on the iPad. This may be a push for iPhone, but useful for gamers who are going to use tablets for gaming.