Mobile Games

[Angela D'souza]

I am going to invest lot's of money on mobile games development which i am going to market. Before i invest, i would like to get an honest opinion from you all.
--Is it worth to invest for mobile games as there so many other resources like x-box and internet available?
-- Does teenagers & adult really use mobile just for games in US?

Please let me know.
Thank You,
Angela

[Jean-Paul Cassis]

Game development is a tough market in general, on mobile phones especially.

In order to earn money with JME games, from my point of view, it is necessary to get paid for the game development at least partially by a company which wants to use the game in a marketing campaign.

After a brief period of time your game will be "cracked" and available for free. Therefore, money is earned only in a brief period of time directly after the launch.

In my opinion, if you want to go for money, choose another road.

[Joachim Rohde]

Biggest cost-factor for developing J2ME-games is still porting and testing on different end-devices.
I have no up-to-date numbers, but 5 years ago really complex J2ME games cost more than 100000 Euro... On the other hand, I don't know what "lot's of money" means to you.

[fred rosenberger]

Originally posted by Angela D'souza:
-- Does teenagers & adult really use mobile just for games in US?

Clearly I can't speak for all teenagers and adults in the U.S. But personally, I don't know ANYONE that plays games on their cell phone.

[Jan Cumps]

Originally posted by fred rosenberger:

Clearly I can't speak for all teenagers and adults in the U.S. But personally, I don't know ANYONE that plays games on their cell phone.

My son plays Snakes on my very old Nokia. It's hard to beat him. But he's from outside U.S.

[Ulf Dittmer]

My son plays Snakes on my very old Nokia.

I do too ... about twice a year, when I'm desperately bored waiting for something. I wouldn't pay money for a game, though.

[Gavin Tranter]

would rather pay for a DS game is i was going to play games on the move.
I do play the golf game on my phone when i am extremely bored. I dont even like golf, but it was already on the phone and was the best of the 3 games bundled with the phone.

[duke glasgow]

Now a days people are showing much craze in playing games on their mobiles.so your idea may earn you a lot of money.

[Paul Sturrock]

"duke glasgow", please check your private messages.

[R van Vliet]

Earning money with mobile games on a pay per download basis is doable provided you have a high quality app. That said though I'm rather skeptical about J2ME being the platform of choice. iPhone/iTouch based devices don't use Java at all, Android uses Java but not J2ME, and there a few more examples all of which bypass the biggest issue with J2ME namely porting (and this is the voice of experience talking).

I'd say there's better ways to invest your money at this point in time unless you think you found a niche. For example, it still puzzles me that mobile apps aren't more "social" apps seeing as they run on a social device of sorts.