"The future of social gaming is on mobile phones and away from Facebook"

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Michel Guillemot, CEO of mobile game publisher Gameloft, believes that the future of social gaming is on mobile phones and away from Facebook.

That’s what he told investment bank Berenberg in a recent interview, and published in a research note last week.

I’m inclined to agree.

Facebook is moving away from being a “platform” and towards just being a social graph and payment mechanism. In that context, the “just” is still a very big deal indeed.

The recent Flurry report (discussed on TechCrunch) shows how fast this is happening. Mobile has now overtaken the PC as the preferred access device to the Internet, with more minutes per day spent accessing the web via mobile than via computer. The two big categories are games (47 per cent. of usage) and social networking (32 per cent.)

I suspect that this includes tablet usage, and as tablets continue to take market share from laptops and netbooks, I think this trend is going to accelerate. PCs will be relegated to the office and for people (like me) who do a lot of content creation. For people who just consume online content, the tablet/mobile combination will be hard to beat.

Which says to me that the opportunity in online games is moving from “social” to “mobile social”. If you are making games for Facebook, I would start accelerating your mobile strategy right now.

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