Every Tail Has A Head

The Head of the Long Tail:

The Long Tail is great, but it does not work if you don’t also offer all the products at the head of the tail.

The Short Tail: Mobile Content Deck:

The deck, as the industry terminology goes (basically the interface on your mobile service through which you enter these content services), has a very limited inventory, and whatever ends up on the deck sells in bucketloads. Those which do not make it, do not. At all.

When we were (ultimately futilely) rebuilding The Games Kitchen, this was what we were trying to achieve. The problem was that it was difficult to get what would be considered the products at the head of the tail (although we had terrific co-operation from everyone else). Off-portal sales just weren’t much of a priority for the bigger players.

As an aside, and as a semi-follow-on from GDC, I find it a little sad that the mobile games industry (the downloadable part of it anyway) is barely 3 years old and already it’s in need of exploding, almost as much as its larger cousin is in need of it…