Last week I attended Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Despite the fact that MWC is not exactly a gaming industry event, many media companies, device and chip manufacturers and carriers were showcasing games and gaming devices there.
I must say I was surprised to see how badly many of these companies misunderstand the value mobility could bring to games. For the most part, the games that were showcased were designed as a poor-man’s versions of desktop games, rather than original works. It feels like the industry as a whole still considers mobile phones (or mobile gaming devices for that matter) as devices with limited screen size and graphics performance. It would appear that they believe the only gaming related use of mobile phones is to pass time in a bus.
My view is this. High-end gaming is not just for home consoles which, for the most part, gather dust by the TV anyway. Mobile phones have several interesting (but under-utilized) features, which could be harnessed to make great, new games. Here I’ve outlined a few points connecting mobility trends and developments to mobile gaming.
Fast Internet connectivity
An Internet connection is important as a content delivery channel, but equally important for multiplayer and social games, an increasingly important sub-sector of the gaming domain. The rise of the mobile Internet has been surprisingly slow but is now showing real growth. According to Nielsen, as of May 2008, 40 million US users (or 15.6%) use mobile internet services regularly. Coupled with the fact that 95M US users paid to access the internet, the business is obviously there (the latest figures are much higher, in excess of 50M active users in the US). Being connected all the time encourages cool gaming concepts. Not many games (not to my knowledge anyway) have designed ‘mini’ UI’s which can be used to access e.g., in-game messages quickly and conveniently on the mobile phone. These kinds of additional access points would add to the overall stickiness of the game as well as the immersiveness of the concept.
Camera and other sensors
The camera and the display (and the internet connection) are a cool combination which can be found in virtually every pocket nowadays. In the MWC, there were a couple of nice augmented reality demos using these tools. One demo I’d like to mention is Nokia ImageSpace, which is a content sharing network where the content is placed in a 3D space. The media is placed according to data from the phone’s sensors, i.e., gyros, GPS and a compass. In other words, when you take a photo it will appear in this 3D world in relation to the real-world location in which the photo was taken. The 3D world will over time evolve into a comprehensive visual representation of the world. ImageSpace can be accessed with a desktop browser client but also with a phone client. The phone client works so that it displays content super-imposed on the camera image showing which direction they are in, and when you get closer, also what they are. As a potential use-case, think of a history tour where you walk around town and get information and images of the places 1000 years ago. This could immediately be turned towards game concepts as well, such as a treasure hunt or hide and seek, or something much more complex.
Better graphics
Many people still think of all the not-so-cool Java games as a reference for mobile games graphics. I advise them to think again! As an example of today’s technology, the Toshiba TG01 using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chip can deliver 3D graphics with up to 22M triangles/sec and 133M 3D pixels/sec (this is alot). This on a crystal clear 4.1” touch screen displaying 800*480 pixels is really something! I saw a cool graphics demo (the content did not make that much sense unfortunately), which used OpenGL 2.0 for graphics.
Phone book
Arguably the biggest success in social networking during the past year-and-half has been Facebook, which resembles an MMOG (or a virtual world). So, what exactly is FB’s value? It’s in the social graph.
The social graph is a term used by FaceBook meaning, “the global mapping of everybody and how they’re related”. The social graph is also something mobile phone manufacturers and carriers would have had access to for years through people’s phonebooks and call logs. The social graph is as important in social gaming as it is in other social networks, and could be utilized to create very immersive, life-like social gaming experiences.
Distribution channels
My last point is not exactly a feature, but is still a very important thing anyway. When Apple launched their appstore more than a year ago, they did a great favor to the industry as a whole. Soon to follow was Google, with their similar Android Market, and finally last week Nokia announced their Store at the MWC. This is very important, as prior to this, developers had been forced to deal with a seemingly endless number of download services and mobile added value content resellers. This is analogous to trying to get your product to 10,000 store-fronts dealing with each and every shop keeper separately. I have heard of multiple cases where the developer was left high-and-dry after obscure deductions from the gross. As you know, this has led to a situation where developers have been funded by the publishers, who in return, have offered capital for running things and for marketing the games.
Now, with these new services (a similar thing is happening in console gaming as well; think of Wii or PS3 online), developers have a far less risky and simultaneously easier path to market. This will not just provide a higher share of the revenues to the developer, but also and for the first time, provide a proper incentive to build (and eventually find) interesting independent games (Does the long-tail finally have a home for games?). Having said that, there will obviously be plenty of room for the biggest nextGen releases in the future. The point here is that we will see a rise in independent releases in the mobile space as well as the more traditional gaming spaces.
//Paavo
