Omdia: Biggest subscriptions opportunity in mobile is casual and cloud | GDC 2022
James Batchelor
Editor-in-Chief
Friday 25th March 2022
Casual audience and cloud gaming hold the key to subscriptions' future in mobile.
That's according to Omdia's principal games analyst George Jijiashvili, who gave a talk during GDC 2022's Free-to-Play Summit in San Francisco earlier this week on the challenges and opportunities for anyone considering using a subscription business model in their titles.
"The biggest opportunities I'm seeing are in the casual cloud gaming content service and cloud PC services," he told attendees.
"You might remember Hatch, Rovio's cloud gaming service that they tried but shut down last year. I didn't really understand the point of streaming mobile games on your phone when you can just download them. I just didn't really see the proposition there.
"Having a service that lets you try out lots of games instantly through cloud gaming - even though they're mobile games - is actually an interesting proposition"
"But the more I think about it, the more companies I speak to in the space, I'm actually seeing why there's quite a big opportunity in actually streaming free-to-play games and other types of mobile games."
He cited two key reasons, the first being discoverability. Jijiashvili posits that few people regularly delve into app stores to seek new games. Even when they do, they need to wait for the download and installation to complete -- short though this may be compared with console and PC titles -- before they can even try it.
"There's just a lot of friction," Jijiashvili said. "So by just having a service that lets you try out lots of games instantly through cloud gaming -- even though they're mobile games -- is actually an interesting proposition."
He observed that Chinese megacorp (and the
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