face book games... mobile games... game companies are in for a hard crash if they think this is actually profitable, the people at work play mobile games but only free ones, I've talked to countless people even in asia and they agree if they had to pay for a mobile game they wouldn't play it.
sad part is disney and other major game studios are now focused on this sort of mobile game development, I encourage you to look in most game company's jobs page for game designer/developer positions, you'll see "Game Developer (mobile)" and "game designer" (open it and the description says: "looking for a talented game designer who is focused on mobile game development")
no offense to all those companies but any game you make for mobile people will not buy, they will hack it and torrent it, no one is going to pay for a mobile game.. the reason? games are usually small and with poor graphics, most contain only 1 'level' most mobile games can be compared in both quality and concept to the average flash game found on newgrounds. the controls are very limited, I mean , very very limited leaving most 3d games as autoscrollers (giving the player almost no motor-controls for the character except maybe a jump a roll and side to side movement) it's like the equivalent of only having a joystick and no buttons.
people will not buy this.
people rarely even spend money on real PC/consol games, why? the quality has dropped substantially with all the excessive fadding and retcons and concept and context molestation. the game play has even begun to suffer in most games, too much realism makes superman bleed when he nicks himself with a shaver, and flying? pft! you can kiss that special ability goodbye.
my point, people only buy and play good games, if videogame companies are so lazy or incompetent that they can't make a good game and thier sales suffer (cause everyone illegally downloads it and plays it on PC) so much to the point that they feel they need to take advantage of the recent boom of mobile gamers and try to market games to them, then I forsee the early 80's happening again.
Video Game Crash #2.
the first videogame crash was brought on by expensive systems with very few game titles, and the fact that a majority of the game titles had not been beta tested and were released for sale with game breaking glitches.
Nintendo fixed this with thier policy of "in order for you to publish for our system your game must be proven to work"
but now this next crash is coming because of a lack of quality and a steady degrasion of concept and context and a slow enlaming of gameplay. good graphics and a game that works and lots of titles may have caused a boom in the N64 PS- PS2 era but now gamers are getting wise. 1000 working games with crappy fad based gameplay and concept aspects might as well be worth 1 game of superior quality even if it does have a few bugs. thier sudden focus on mobile games is the last straw, I even saw the newest final fantasy will be a mobile exclusive title. I've talked with forums of thousands, they will not be buying that final fantasy title, nor any mobile title, they will only play the free mobile games.
game companies will regret thier focus on mobile platforms, and NCSoft will regret turning CoH into a mobile or flash game if they do.