One of the most exciting areas that is growing in the connected phone market is massive multi-player online role playing games (MMORPG). This year’s growth in the smart phone market has already outpaced the non-feature phones. Depending on whose statistics you look at, there has been considerable growth in the feature phone area by at least a double digit figure. Imagine if a chunk of these mobile phones are connected to MMORPG.Already, an independent German developer and publisher of online games, CipSoft, has broken the 10,000 subscribers barrier to their TibiaME MMORPG game. As more and more of the connected phones get to market, we will definitely be seeing an increasing growth in the MMORPG area not only in terms of population but also in terms of online time since people will be able to play the game even outside of their homes.
TibiaME’s growth more than doubled in 2008. It’s exciting to see that mobile phone users are starting to play MMORPG on their phones. With more phones getting bigger screens, more powerful CPU’s, unlimited data plans this number will continue to grow.
Another factor that will increase the growth in this area will be the availability of micropayments for the mobile phone users. Micropayment services startup has already been growing steadily as more investors see the viability and need of the service.
I’ve used TibiaME on a lower resolution phone and I think that the only hindrance is the low resolution which will definitely get resolved once the connected smart phones becomes mainstream.
