Mobile Entertainment

Let's gets a few things straight first. As Gameloft chief Michel Guillemot pointed out in his keynote on Monday, the mobile games industry is sound health generally (at least if you're a top five publisher).

And as Nokia's content boss Anssi Vanjoki told the sandaled masses a day later, mobile phones are the single greatest contributor to the future of mankind. Or something along those lines.

But there's something not quite right when it comes to games. If we allow ourselves to indulge in a bit of bullshit bingo, we'd call it a 'disconnect'. Guillemot ventured that various 'roadblocks' meant the market wasn't reaching its full potential.

These included poor retail/merchandising, prohibitive data costs and - worryingly considering the relative maturity of the market - crappy games. In fact, ME is aware of one title being pushed on UK operator decks that is riddled with known bugs, including one that fundamentally undermines the gameplay.

Such cases are the exception rather than the rule and even the console/PC games industry isn't immune to the odd turkey. But Guillemot's point was that combined with all the other barriers, it all adds up to a hard sell, particularly where D2C channels are concerned.

Publishers running their own on-deck channels and Nokia's N-Gage were mentioned as possible panaceas to the 'how to grow the market' conundrum. Vanjoki, meanwhile, coined the term 'web NG' (next-gen) as the way forward. It's like web 2.0 but better, where 'we mix and mash up reality with virtuality'.

He also talked, more practically perhaps, about targeting the 200 million people who buy Nokia's high-end handsets and try all the cool new stuff.

Probably part of the problem with games is the sheer number of stakeholders in the market - operators, publishers, developers, handset makers, technology providers:  they all have different priorities and pull in different directions.

What's needed is some kind of unifying force. That could well be N-Gage. But it could also be more cooperation at operator level or a new cross-handset approach to how games are developed or new measures to create a more hospitable D2C channel.

Like that buggy game mentioned earlier, the issues are known. But can the industry come together to deal with them?