Digital Bridges, wireless entertainment publisher, has announced its 10 millionth WAP gaming session.

The company, which develops its own mobile entertainment titles and distributes those of other developers through relationships with network operators, said it recorded 71.4m minutes of WAP gaming in the past 18 months. The data reinforce the notion that gaming is one of the few areas in which first generation WAP services have established a significant user base. The most popular games were the virtual pet and Steve Jackson’s Sorcery role-playing adventure. However, with the advent of packet-data services on most networks, Digital Bridges will need to provide an alternative metric more consistent with data-based billing mechanisms.

“Although we provide a vast array of mobile entertainment solutions across a number of technologies, WAP gaming is one of Digital Bridges’ core competencies, as it is what the company initially started out with,” said Brian Greasley, Chief Executive Officer at Digital Bridges. “We’ve built a broad portfolio of WAP games, both branded and unbranded and are proud of the success of our titles. Digital Bridges has seen a steady uptake in WAP game play over the past two years. During the first six months of 2002 alone Digital Bridges has recorded close to 4m WAP games played. We expect this number to grow significantly in the second half of 2002 and into 2003 as new killer content is being developed and WAP eventually will reinvent itself to be less technology driven and more user friendly.”

Insight

This may sound like a lot of gameplay, but at an average of EUR 0.15 per minute, that only represents EUR 10.71m in additional revenue generated for network operators over 18 months. Given that Digital Bridges has one of the largest distribution networks in the business, this hardly bodes well for the multi-billion mobile gaming market we’ve heard so much about in research reports.

On a brighter note, the continuing growth at the beginning of this year shows that improvements such as colour and better interfaces on WAP handsets are helping to drive adoption of wireless data services. This trend will surely continue as true smartphones extend capabilities at the high end of the market and previously high-end features start to appear in mass consumer devices.