Everyone in the mobile games industry knows that social gaming is the way forward - it is the gold-plated escape chute that will lead out of the current ghetto. They also know that casual games are just as important - if not more so - than big name console conversions and half-arsed movie tie-ins. And this is why we're seeing lots of developers working on simple games with connected features. The simpler and more connected the better.
Last year, the stand out example was Digital Chocolate's lovely Dchoc Café series, offering well-presented versions of archetypal games like solitaire, complete with chat and high score elements. This year, it seems studios are keen to explore user-generated content, adding one more trendy web 2.0 concept into the bubbling mix. Two examples stand out - mostly because they're based around the same concept - the simple paper and pen game, Hangman. Last night, Glu Mobile's My Hangman was awarded the Global Mobile Award for Best Mobile Game at the GSM Awards. The game allows you to customize its background with your own photos and even cut and paste photos of your mates onto the face of the gradually embodied hanged man.
Slightly more ambitious, perhaps, is Vivendi's Celebrity Hangman, which allows users to write their own 'pop-culture themed' lists of hangman challenges and submit them to the dedicated Web site. These lists could then be selected to appear in the weekly download packs, available to fans of the game.
Industry analyst, Informa, reckons mobile social networking could be worth US$52 billion by 2012. The mobile games industry wants a piece of that action.
