Free mobile game

For those who don’t know, Slingbox is a TV streaming device that allows users full control of your TV set at home through the internet. It’s basically a combination of technological prowess and fairy dust that enables this VERY sweet product to “just work”. Meaning if you’re a Dodgers Fan on a business trip in the East Coast, you can watch their games as if you were in your own living room. If you saved the season finale of Lost to your PVR, you can watch that too.

Now that convenience is coming to your iPhone. Which is fitting since SlingPlayer Mobile has been available for WinMob, Palm, and Symbian for some time now and we all know none of those platforms offer a screen quite like the iPhone. Though it’s still very, very early in development, Sling has a proof-of-concept version of SlingPlayer Mobile running on jailbroken iPhones.

SlingMedia will also be holding live demonstrations of SlingPlayer Mobile on the iPhone and iPod Touch for those attending WWDC. Their Product Manager Vicky Shum will be at the Starbucks at 120 4th Street, San Francisco (across from the Metreon) between 10am and 4pm Pacific Time on Monday, June 9th. The demo is open to everybody, so if you’re in the bay area for WWDC feel free to check it out!

A recent post on Kotaku raised concern, citing a quote from mobile developer LemonQuest’s CEO, Ignacio Cavero. Cavero told the website Pocketgamer that Apple will be selling iPhone games for 17-18 Euros, which comes out to around $25.

“We’re going to see a new generation of [mobile] games,” Cavero said. “Instead of being sold for 5 Euros in Europe, they’ll be closer to 10 or 12 Euros. Take a look at what Apple is preparing for iPhone. Their games will be sold in iTunes for 17-18 Euros.”

The way Cavero phrased this statement, it sounded to some like Apple is the one setting the price. But back in March, Apple announced that applications sold through iPhone 2.0 software, including games, will be priced by their developers. At the time, Apple said, “developers set the price for their applications–including free — and retain 70 percent of all sales revenues.”

Currently, games for the iPod are sold through iTunes and only cost $5 each. In some cases, this can be a great bargain, like in the fully featured edition of Popcap’s Peggle. With iPhone 2.0 software, iPhone games will appear on a third-party “App Store” that is likely to be similar to iTunes. We hope to have more information on iPhone’s upcoming games, including hands-on impressions, later this month.

In 2006, mobile game platform Greystripe launched GameJump.com, a distribution site for free, ad-supported cellphone games; since then, consumers have downloaded over 65 million copies of Greystripe’s hundreds of titles. The company will publish an extended report of their user data later this week, but were nice enough to give me an advance peek. I’m looking at a lot of surprising numbers, but the most striking one to me is how gamers interact with the ads that appear before and after gameplay.

According to Greystripe, 10.1 percent of them click on the ads, a CTR that far outstrips web ads, which average some 1 percent to 2 percent. I strongly suspect at least some of these are accidental, fumble-thumb click-throughs, but even then, from the advertisers’ perspective, that’s not a bug, but a feature. And while mobile games are almost by definition casual, the demographic breakdown is markedly different from the web-based casual space, which is dominated by older women.

By contrast, 69 percent of the site’s U.S. users are aged 18-34, and 60 percent are male — roughly the same percent that own a PS3/360/Wii game console. So unsurprisingly, the top 20 titles are not just puzzle games, but arcade-flavored titles like Rollercoaster Rush and Bikini Pool Summer, from a studio called, appropriately enough, Guy Games. With data like this, I think we’re going to see a lot more money moving to mobile.

Remember back in the day, when Sonic appeared on the Megadrive for the first time? I bought the game, as did a lot of other people (!), and were amazed by the super-fast graphics and multitude of eye-mashing colours. How things have come on - the same game is now doing the rounds on a lot of Mobile devices!

SEGA Mobile plans to build on the success of the Sonic brand with the introduction of three new titles this year, including Sonic at the Olympic Games, Sonic Spinball and Sonic the Hedgehog 2.