The game industry is changing. Very fast. Of course, it's done this for a while now, but over the last twelve months it seems to have accelerated again. One of the key drivers of this rapid evolution is the creation of new channels through to consumers. Developers are no longer constrained to making games for the PC or consoles. There are now a staggering variety of technologies and platforms which support gaming. From the virtual consoles on the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii, to mobile phones, handheld devices like the DS and PSP and even the new generation of electronic gadgets like the iPhone and iPod can all now be used to play games of some sort.
However there's some reluctance from various areas of the games industry to recognise many of these channels as platforms capable of playing 'real' games. The whole notion of 'real' games - as in those which appear on consoles and PC is one which drives us crazy and we spent many hours in Edinburgh at various festivals last month banging on about the opportunities and advantages of working on these new platforms which do NOT require huge up front budgets, enormous teams or publisher approval.
That whole topic is something for another moment, when we've not had quite so much coffee, but it was HUGELY encouraging to see a press release from Cobra Mobile this morning talking about the launch of their new casual games portal.
Cobimobi.com will offer all of Cobra's new games for PC and the company is making a great deal of the fact that they're planning to design all of their new titles for as many platforms as possible - including all of those listed above.
They've launched two titles initially - starting with two original games - Cobi Treasure Deluxe and Numba(TM).
You can see this idea at work in both games. Numba uses a rather nifty control system which works rather nicely with mouse, touchscreen and joypad. We've not tried it on any other systems (yet), but we'd imagine it would also be rather nice to use with the Wii controller and as a one-thumb mobile game.
Both games are available as free downloads and can be played for 45 minutes totally free of charge before you have to buy them (at which point they cost £11.95 / $19.05 / €17.50).
We'll be keeping an eye on CobiMobi and Cobra's 'omni-gaming' approach as new games appear.
You can read the full press release after the link...
PocketGamer has just posted the next in its thoughtful series on the mobile games companies in Dundee. This time around it's Cobra Mobile under the spotlight, with MD Mark Ettle answering Jon Jordan's probing questions.
