On the eighth day of Christmas, Pocket Gamer gave to me...
Eight maids a-milking licences and existing game franchises?
Milk is one of those slippery literary substances that can be used in various contradictory ways. Enter the promised land and you'll find it flowing with milk and money, while simultaneously, unimaginative corporations will be said to be milking consumers, no doubt in reference to the daily teet-toil of the dairy farmer.
On that basis, eight maids a-milking could be seen as the honest-to-goodness labour that underpins the rustic idyll. Turn the scene on its head, however, and the serfs are being denied their human rights when it comes to leisure and the pursuit of happiness. You sups your glass of opaque white liquid and hopes you're not lactose intolerant.
Does this have anything to do with pocket gaming, you're probably/hopefully now asking?
Well, it all boils down to the eternal debate between original and licensed/branded games. In a significant piece of research on the UK's best-selling mobile games of 2007, our own Stu Dredge reckons only 10 per cent (four out of 41 games that appeared in the ELSPA top 10 chart between January and October 2007) were original designs; 17 per cent were based on TV or film brands, while 51 per cent were based on existing console, PC or retro games.
But looking on the bright side, people only pay for what they want, and as the Japanese have recently demonstrated, they just can't get enough of new versions of very old games on the new handhelds they've bought. In its first week of release for example, 288,000 copies of the DS version of Final Fantasy IV – a great game, albeit one first released in 1991 and which has since been released on five different consoles – were sold.
As for Pocket Gamer, we're agnostic – we like ours warm and frothy, albeit with a touch of nutmeg.
