By William Jackson
GIN technology correspondent
There is a ready-made base of customers ready to adopt wireless gaming, according to a new high-tech marketing report.
In-Stat/MDR of Scottsdale, Ariz., estimates that by 2009, mobile gaming services in the United States will generate $1.8 billion annually. This would be only 4.4 percent of total wireless data revenues, but would constitute a significant niche market, reflecting an expected 10-fold increase in the number of mobile gamers.
One key to expanding this market is improving the gaming experience. One company thinks it has a technology to accomplish this. Atrua Technologies Inc. of Campbell, Calif., has received $12 million in venture capital funding to help bring its Atrua Wings mobile phone control system to market.
"The game developers we have been working with believe this functionality will really allow the market to pick up," said marketing director Marc Ostrowski.
Ostrowski said seven customers are in the process of incorporating the technology into their handsets.
According to the In-Stat/MDR study, 6.5 percent of current U.S. wireless subscribers are interested in purchasing mobile gaming services. These potential customers are predominately young males who already play games an average of 5.1 hours per week on other devices, including PCs, game consoles and handhelds.
So far, mobile gamers have been limited largely to single-player board, puzzle and word games.
Ostrowski said these genres have pretty much exhausted the capabilities of the traditional mobile phone, with its numerical buttons and one-directional navigation buttons.
"It's not designed to play games on," he said. Atrua Wings could change that.
The Atrua product began as a fingerprint recognition system, with a small solid-state sensor that reads a finger's ridges to authenticate the user. This could be used to control access to services and authorize digital payments.
When coupled with software to track motion across the sensor and convert it to three-dimensional coordinates, the product can enable navigation through an online game.
"The mobile phone is the market with the most need for this, as well as being the largest market for us," Ostrowski said.
He said Atrua has signed up seven companies in Japan, Korea and the United States, although they have not been publicly announced. None has yet brought an Atrua-enabled handset to market.
"Some have a very clear idea of how they're going to use it," Ostrowski said. Gaming is "definitely an important piece of the puzzle, particularly in Japan and Korea. They are the bellwethers of the market, and they are really hot."