At GDC Gamevil (that’s Gameville, as in town, not game-evil) promoted the concept of one-button mobile games. The most well known is Skipping Stone, distributed by I-play in the west, where players have to press a button at exactly the right time to keep a stone bouncing across the water. One-button games are different from one-thumb games, which use different keys. According to Gamevil president Kyu C. Lee the benefits of one-button game are a shorter development time, a quicker return on investment, simplicity of play for customers which expands the market, and the games are a better fit for increasingly smaller handsets.
One interesting part of the article is the casual mention of Gamevil’s “innovative one-button RPG title, Path of a Warrior”. I cannot imagine how an RPG would work with one button, but I’d be interested to find out. Apparently there aren’t any plans to release it in western markets, though…