A hat-trick of posts today. This one's something I've wanted to do for ages; it was something we fancied trying out under the Fat Parrot brand, but have never quite gotten to. I alluded to it in my post about Fat Parrot, but here's a bit more detail.

The Android marketplace has no approval, and lets you launch games within minutes. One of the things I remember from my computing teacher at secondary school was a quote he was fond of: "bigger problems don't mean bigger solutions, they mean different solutions". Scale brings differences in approach. Big O Notation and all that.

So Android's lack of approval doesn't just let you do stuff faster than Apple and Nokia will allow you to, it opens up completely new opportunities. Then consider Wieden & Kennedy doing that lovely reactive Old Spice stuff on Twitter: you can streamline production of even high-quality content and do it "live".

So imagine taking 5-7 different game formats: sliding tiles, puzzles, "catch a falling object", etc. - and being able and ready to reskin them in response to a news story, every day - and publish them, there and then. So that by 8am you have a few games in the marketplace which are simple enough for anyone to understand, and tied - perhaps amusingly - into something that's only just happened.

My gut is that this would let you see more sales from the effort you put into writing one of these games; that occasionally some of these games would go or be driven viral, and generate disproportionate returns; that the scarcity of deleting old games might even encourage downloads or sales; and that you'd have something which could scale across territories. You'd also get a chance to iterate daily (something few business do right now), learn what works and what doesn't, and get better, day in, day out.

6 game formats, daily launches, earning £50 each day in 5 territories doesn't feel unachievable and is about half a million a year in revenue.

Maybe one day...

Comments

[kgutteridge]

All you would need is something like a Fruit machine without carrier approval it would certainly work as it certainly had some merit 5 years ago with a lot more hoops to jump through! and far far nicer revenue shares on global distribution (Google -> Blue Sphere Games Fruit Machine)

The only thing is it does become the soul destroying task for your team, you crashed this weeks build of you go and reskin Fruit Machine for your crimes, you will be bug free after about the 10th iteration

[Tom Hume]

Was Blue Sphere one of your apps?

I can't work out why someone hasn't done this on Droid yet. I think the reskinning could be a pure design+artworking job, and not that soul-destroying: there'd be a creative element to it, every day. Deployment could be automated too...

[kgutteridge]

I used to work at Blue Sphere Games which was my immersion into mobile did numerous titles before weI gave it up!
I did learn a thing or two about shipping multiple reskinnable games, in a multitude of languages for a variety of platforms, which is proving useful in the Android space as I am sure you are finding, the J2ME experience translates pretty well to Android!