Ronald Diemicke (1181) on 4/27/2006 11:11 AM · Permalink · Report

Well... Today was the second day of the Mobile and Online Games Forum and it really was a pretty good compliment to the setup of yesterday (although arguably less strong of a showing). It seemed to be more elaboration on the thoughts expressed yesterday, but that being said, today some people came who hadn't yesterday and its always interesting chatting with people who are into the gaming scene in different ways. Lots of varied sentiments were expressed ranging from the comparison of the flooded mobile games market to the Atari game boom of the '80s to trouble of trying to predict the level of industry growth for the next three years. However of the day, there were really two high points for me:

1) A representative of Konami told me that they would be putting some game music on iTunes in the next two months - which is very promising for the video game music market.
and
2) Chris Early, Studio Manager for the Microsoft Casual Games Group kind of got caught for a loop when news of Microsoft's purchase of Massive Inc. came up in the middle of a Q&A session just as the news broke on the net. It made for some pretty interesting spinning and recovery to say the least...

Overall a pretty good forum for discussion and I'm probably going to get to work shortly on compiling my notes into something that resembles coherent thought soon because I'm not quite sure how I was supposed to come away feeling about mobile gaming, especially considering I didn't know a whole lot to begin with. As an outsider looking in, I get the feeling they've got quite a ways to go before they'll reach any sort of stability.