Mohammed Al Maskari, Director General, Knowledge Oasis Muscat deliver the opening address at this year's eGames: The State of Play Conference: Here it is.It's a great pleasure to welcome you to eGames – Knowledge Oasis Muscat’s annual electronic gaming conference.
This two-day event will focus on mobile and serious gaming. We have attracted distinguished speakers from Oman, the UAE, Britain, Canada, Sweden and Singapore. Indeed, the eGames blog has had hits from countries as diverse as France, Saudi Arabia, the US, Canada, Romania, South Africa and Brazil. People across the globe have been learning about KOM, eGames and beautiful Oman.
Today, Gaming isn’t just about entertainment it’s about education and training. It’s about using games to help people learn about managing money, fighting disease, preparing emergency services to deal with natural disasters, training air force pilots, guiding geologists on digging oil wells, through to helping my children learn English and keeping them occupied at the weekend!
This morning I’d like to talk a little about mobile gaming - Advances in mobile telephone handset technology, such as large colour screens, larger memory capacity and compact physical size, in addition to developments in 3G, EDGE and Java will enable the market to realise the potential of mobile handsets as fully-fledged gaming devices.
What makes mobile gaming so different from any other type of console based gaming is the fact that the ‘potential mobile gamer’ already owns the platform on which they can play the game.
The penetration of game enabled mobile devices, which stands at 40% of the 2 billion devices worldwide today, is set to grow to 97% of all mobile phones sold in 2008. Compare this to videogames where over the past 25 years 500 million consoles have been sold, compared to the 600 million mobiles sold just in the past 12 months. The figures are staggering and so are the opportunities. It's clear that mobile gaming is definitely not a market to be ignored.
But who's playing mobile games and how are they playing? Figures reveal that more women than men are playing games on handsets. When we look at the behaviour of the average mobile gamer, we find that games are played in short bursts of time - it’s a virtual snack in comparison to the four-course banquet offered by the consoles.
Let's briefly consider one of the world's most dynamic gaming markets, Japan. In fact, when it comes to mobile gaming, the Japanese are at the bleeding edge. Only a few years ago, nearly every twenty-something Tokyo commuter spent their entire journey sending e-mails on their phones, now they’re playing mobile games. The Japanese mobile games market is thriving and in time we should expect to see the same boom in Oman. We want to be ready and we want to lead it in the region.
The mobile gaming sector is the fastest growing segment of the gaming market. It's more than evident that the opportunities are there for those who understand the dynamics of this rapidly growing industry. We hope that eGames will motivate Oman-based telco operators and content providers to drive this industry on and up and achieve its true potential. Oman has a lot to offer.
I wish you a pleasant and profitable two days.
Thank you.
