After entering the site, I went directly to the registration area. I spent much time in the past, browsing the catalogue so I figured I could skip that part. The registration went really fast and easy. Two thumbs up for that! About two minutes after registration, I was already at the point of downloading my game Yokiyo from Orange Pixel.

The download went smooth. Since I’m based in the Netherlands, I could not select to receive the download via SMS and so I entered the wap url myself. No big problem as the url was easy to type and tiny in size. The site also gave me the option to download jad and jar files. A good option for the more experienced user I recon, though do we really want to make users this smart about how to install games manually? Well the games are free anyway…

When starting the game I downloaded, Gamejump presented me a screen telling me the game sometimes needs to connect to download ads. No problem of course. Once the game started, I played a few rounds and then closed down. A nice thing from Orange Pixel is that the game also allowed me to share my highscores. After closing down the game, I got an advert in front of me to download another game. Since I was curious if this was the only option, I declined. Next advert shown was the gamejump logo. After that I was able to fully exit the game.

So far, so good. Since I was curious to see an advert and it’s workings, I started the game again. Immediately I am shown the advert for the other game again. This time I choose the option to download it. I was pointed to the wapsite and the first question was which device I have. I recon useragent recognition would have fitted here since the brand Nokia was on page two, and when I needed to select the model ‘6670’, it took me ages of clicking around to get there. After finally getting on the right page, I got asked to accept the terms and conditions and finally… the download came in! I fired up the new game I downloaded, and got some fresh totally white ads in my screen. I quitted the game almost directly as it was the worst mobile racing game I ever played, and got presented the white ad again and a link to download Frozen Front, a game I personally like a lot.

On the developer side, GameJump clearly makes a statement about game quality. If consumers don’t play your game, you will not generate ad views and so you will generate no money from it. Quality of gameplay is vital! We asked Pascal Besteboer from Orange Pixel about his experience as a developer with the system.

A few months ago I had extensive contact with various advert-gaming companies, and although they all had some good and bad points going for them, the end decision was made fairly easy with the AdWrap system that Greystripe has developed.

Advert-gaming is somewhat of a new leap for mobile-gaming, with no idea yet if it will be a good solution both business wise as well as for the gamers. The Adwrap system made it possible for us to just get some of our games, literally wrap them up, and get them out there to see how advert-gaming is doing.

All other solutions I had a look at, simply required us to put time into learning their SDK/API's and update all our old game code, this would not be a real problem if we knew exactly what to expect from the advertising part of it, but without knowing any real-world figures the decision to go for a 100% automated solution was simple. 

Besides their great adwrapping system, Greystripe also seems to be having a clear-focus on where they are taking things and how to make it work for everyone involved (gamers,developers,and advertisers). This gave me a positive feeling about partnering with them, cause lets face it, it is a hard decision to basically give your games away for free.

Now for the more interesting business side of things, I can say that I am very pleased with the results that Greystripe has managed to get with only the one Gamejump.com portal within the 6 weeks that our games have been live.

Their backend has the nice report for revenue made, something a lot of distributors could learn from, but the more interesting reports are those that tell us how our games are being played. Seeing the average game time at 3 minutes is slightly less then all the market-researches have been telling us so far (they put average game time on 5-10 minutes).

I think that using these reports the mobile-developers can focus more on what type of gamers we are dealing with. Stop creating big console adventures with hours of game play, and focus more on the short-arcade games and add a lot more fun extra's into the mix. This seems what the gamers are looking for and from a business perspective this is what can get you more revenue: the game becomes easier to pickup during bus or train rides, or ironically they replace TV-commercials?

Finally, I do have some worries about this. The most obvious one is: will advertisers like it? What I noticed so far is that most or all ads are internal greystripe/gamejump ads. Not that surprising as they are still starting up, and I can imagine they will be attracting advertisers a lot easier if they have a good solid audience as well as quality games. It remains to be seen how eager the advertisers will be to jump into this though.

The second worry is: do gamers like it? A lot of operators still charge for the data-traffic and not use a fixed-fee, so it could create a negative look at mobile-games because of the "hidden" costs. And although I do believe fixed-fee will eventually take over, this is not the case right now and might cause problems for advert-gaming.

A final thought is that you can almost see Google buying Greystripe to implement their Googleads with the adwrap system...you read it here first ;)