One of the big concerns to emerge out of the Mobile Gaming Forum held the last couple of days in London was how to reach consumers. In a consumer panel of four gamers—ranging from hardcore to casual—two complained that they had a hard time finding games.

May Lin, who plays games on her Xbox and her PC and who plays mobile games to kill time, said that she had noticed that mobile games weren’t advertised very much, and that for casual gamers advertising was virtually non existent. Diogo Quintas, a student pursuing a master’s degree at the London School of Economics, who said he liked puzzle and strategy games (though admitted his favourite was a tank shoot up game that he could not recall the name of), admitted that he had never actually seen an ad for a mobile game and found most of his games “by accident”. He added that he bought all of his games through his operator’s portal. The two experienced gamers sought out specialty game sites or blogs on the internet, including Pocket Gamer and Midlet Review.

The revelation depressed the audience. More after the jump...

Not only did it underscore the challenge of how to bring mobile games to the attention of the casual user, but the sheer dominance that a network operator has with its portal.  “It was shocking to me,” said HandyGames ceo Christopher Kassulke after the session, who noted that he knew just how much companies like his and others were investing to get consumers to notice their products. “Maybe [Quintas] doesn’t have TV, or internet, or maybe it’s not in his head to notice the advertising, but we advertise in magazines, on TV, on channels like MTV and Viva, on ISP’s, and operators promote it on their portals. In Switzerland, I even saw the ad of a competitor in a toilet and we’re going to be putting ads on big trucks so for me what he said was strange.” 

Three UK’s product manager for games Xavier Louis said he was also surprised by the comments, especially as Three works on a weekly basis with the big games publishers such as Glu (NSDQ: GLUU) and Electronic Arts (NSDQ: ERTS) and knows how involved their marketing plans are for mobile games. “They do invest a lot, especially considering how small mobile games are,” he said. But he noted that according to research firm M:Metrics, 85 percent of mobile games were still being bought off operator portals and game sites.

Still, while this may seem like a great statistic for someone like Three, Louis said most operators were more interested in seeing the entire mobile games market grow, noting it was better to have a smaller piece of a much bigger market, than a majority share of a tiny market. “We’re doing a good business with games,” said Louis, referring to the 85 percent statistic, “But we can’t just rely on one link to grow this market, we have got to have more entry points for the consumer and that’s why operators are much more interested in off portal and the mobile web now.”