Mobile games industry is churning customers - Digital Chocolate VP

The growth of the mobile games industry has been stalled by a widespread failure to invest in customer satisfaction, Digital Chocolate marketing VP Jason Spero has told MobileIndustry.biz in an exclusive interview.

Spero believes that the mobile industry has hit a wall in terms of customer penetration not because of too few consumers trialling products, as is the conventional wisdom, but because many of those who do are being disappointed.

"My view is that we're churning users," he explained. "My view is that we're not satisfying end users; my view is that we've got plenty of trial. So many people in the industry are focused on trying to bring more users into the tent - and I'm happy that people are spending effort on trial, we are as well, but the industry as a whole has under-invested in customer satisfaction."

Although he wouldn't name any of the products in question, Spero claimed that Digital Chocolate has identified a "Dirty Dozen" titles which are regularly trialled by users and whose quality is so poor that those users are then lost to the mobile content market.

"There are a lot of them in the racing category, and there are a lot of them in the movies category - and every time a user shows up and downloads one of these, that user is going to be lost to the mobile ecosystem for quite some time," he accused.

"Every time we promote and feature something that is of low quality, and deliver a bad user experience, we've then taken $5.99 or $6.99 from that user, and lost them forever to the ecosystem," he concluded.

Click here to read the first half of our interview with Jason Spero, with the second half to be posted early next week.