Mobile Life (Australia) #1 - Mobile Gaming Down Under

I'm taking up the invitation offered by Scott Janousek in posting more regional related news about the local mobile and Flash Lite industries.

Just like with MWC last week, I'm sure with GDC on at the moment there'll be some cool mobile game news floating around soon. I just wanetd to quickly highlight though the growing mobile games industry here in Australia.

There's a little company that some of you may have heard about that's doing some cool stuff with Flash Lite games, but I wanted to draw some attention to others as well - like Firemint who just won the Public Choice IMG Award for their cool 3D WRC game. They are based on Melbourne and have been creating some great 3D mobile work for a number of years now, along with some big licensed titles and their own IP.

Australia, and Brisbane and Melbourne in particular, is a popular location for game companies of all persuasions. Here in Brisbane we have EA Pandemic, THQ, Krome, and a growing number of smaller companies doing stuff for handheld consoles like Halfbrick. We are all part of a collective called Queensland Games that is organised by the state government - catch QLD Games at GDC this week (and if you find Mark Fludder, ask him to show you his Moket Phone that's loaded up with some new titles from Moket).

Mobile games specifically though are still something that are yet to take a serious hold in the development community here. Perhaps it's our proximity to low-cost labor markets (India, Philippines, etc) or the smaller consumer market here that has not fostered a lot of mobile game development companies. Moket is the main one involved in Flash mobile games, but we don't have as many opportunities in the immediate local market as we do even in the wider Sth East Asia region, or further beyond.

My prediction though is that it's only a matter of time before the high level of investment in console and PC game development here in this country translates into more being done on the mobile platform.