Download Platforms: Retail of games is more and more migrating to Internet download platforms. While prominent mobile phone OEM’s like Nokia, Sony Ericsson or Apple have set-up elaborate games download platforms, most operators’ games areas still resemble a best effort approach. Third party platforms, independent from operating systems, create a USP by offering the largest choice of games. In light of the increasing importance of this market, operators should strive to offer a competitive, if not best in class games offering on their content platform, so as not to endanger their content strategy as a whole.   

Important performance indicators for games platforms are choice, quality and actuality of games, as well as support of the most popular phones. Since gaming normally is not a core competency of operators they should carefully choose the type of operating model to lead their gaming platform to success.

In the authors’ opinion, operators expanding heavily into the content market should take care to fully control the actual platform in order to integrate gaming seamlessly with other content offerings. With regards to the actual games, operators should seek to create a platform as open as possible to increase choice and to keep games offers up to date. Today many operators cooperate with large content wholesalers, which leads to mounting uniformity of content and leaves out smaller but not less creative games developers who prefer to offer their games in open platforms rather than agreeing to disadvantageous wholesale conditions. Many games developers now concentrate their efforts on IPhone Games where their revenue share is considerably higher thus adding to the popularity of the IPhone Value Proposition and further strengthening Apple’s position in their negotiation with operators.

In-Game Advertising: As gaming wins in popularity over other forms of entertainment, so it is used as an advertising channel. In-game advertising consists of static ads e.g. ad-banners in sports games or dynamic ads that can be changed remotely by an ad agency to promote a certain campaign or depending on time of day or logged in-user’s personal interests. Total value of in-game advertising stood at over USD 500 m. in 2008, and is expected to reach USD 1 bn in 2012.[5]