It's just that mobile operators may not be the best people to be providing it: their own walled gardens and focus on brands over quality were what made mobile gaming a niche up until 2008. It's not that Apple and Google's app stores are immune from criticism. That's why I had to stifle a chuckle at the point during Mozilla's Firefox OS press conference at Mobile World Congress when a succession of operators took the stage to complain that Apple and Google's "walled gardens" were bad for consumers. Less than 5% of mobile users paid to download games, and that 5% churned a lot: people had one bad experience then didn't try again for a year or two. While players were the short-term losers – paying £5 for a dreadful film tie-in – in the longer term it hurt the industry. Publishers often made money because they knew the operators would stick their branded games at the top of their portals. Often, the budget left over for making fun gameplay was often slender, to say the least. The publishers of these games paid wild sums for their licensing deals, and then had to suck up expensive costs of porting the games to hundreds of handsets, as demanded by the operators.
Rewind a few years to the time before mobile applications were rebranded as apps: an era when mobile operators were the main store-owners for mobile games, and when rubbish movie tie-ins were heavily promoted on their portals. But it's also a useful illustration of the changing nature of licensing deals between the film and mobile games worlds. I've been playing it this morning, and it's fun, albeit with in-app purchase options running up to £69.99, which may be an unwelcome surprise for parents whose children are playing.
Other settings and characters from the film plus a hot-air balloon section are included in the game, which costs $0.69 on the App Store and Google Play. The new game takes the Temple Run formula to the Land of Oz, as players run, jump and slide along the Yellow Brick Road. It's the second Temple Run game to promote a Disney film – in this case Oz The Great and Powerful – following the release of Temple Run: Brave in the summer of 2012. Temple Run 2 may only be a few weeks old, but Imangi Studios' popular endless-runner game already has a branded spin-off called Temple Run: Oz.