Multiplayer For Mobile Games - Are We There Yet?

Thanks to GameSpot for its feature discussing whether multiplayer mobile phone gaming is genuinely an emerging trend. According to the piece: "For every mobile maven that claims that networked multiplayer is where mobile gaming must direct its energies, there are another two that point to the prohibitive costs, technical barriers, and unacceptable risks that currently stand between wide-spectrum multiplayer and reality." Isaac Babbs of Atlas Mobile frames the problems as "...device limitations and high data costs to the consumer. On many of today's networks, even a simple chess game could hit you for half an hour of airtime--and that's if you manage to make it through without the other player getting fed up and dropping or going into a tunnel and losing reception." Will mobile phone gaming ever take off in the States?

Comments

Going forward...

[dmayle]

I must admit, this is one place that I see Nintendo taking the lead with the new DS. I've seen manny people pan it, because they can't think of a telling use for a game with a second touch-pad screen. Forget single-player games. If Nintendo does the dev kits right, since it's got wi-fi built into it, whether you're playing someone local, or over the net, it could be seemless.

And the touch pad? A perfect device for communication. Forget using the stylus to scribble notes, instead imagine certain regions for different messages, defined large enough so that you can use your thumb to pick one of four, or one of eight, responses. Or the ability to send an invite, a la Xbox-live to a friend no matter what game they're playing, to get them to join you. This is definitely where Microsoft got it right, and I hope Nintendo does as well, because while there are millions of people, from kids to adults who play video games, the number who sit in front of their computer with an IM window of some type open and chatting is even greater, and if you can mix those two markets together, than you will be riding a very powerful market force, indeed...

Re:from the article:

[perlchild]

Very funny, but no, your mobile phone can't do 8-way communication with all 8 members of your party like in Diablo, or party-broadcast either. I imagine they're afraid it would take away from their network revenue.

Re:Bluetooth?

[foidulus]

There's no reason why you couldn't play multiplayer games over bluetooth?
Yeah there is, bluetooth requires the person you are playing with to be in the same area as you. If you are that close together, why not just link up via gameboy?
True mobile gaming would allow me to play a game of chess during my commute to work in Tokyo with a friend in Paris who is riding the metro. Can't do that with bluetooth.
Though I suppose using bluetooth on a train might be an interesting way to meet new people who are into gaming. And nobody is going to try to go "toothing" with the gaming geek! ;)

Re:Bluetooth?

[MC Negro]

DS Has wifi, not the BT.

The DS has Wi-Fi AND bluetooth. Actually, a lot of people are saying that it's not really bluetooth, rather some Nintendo proprietary stack based on bluetooth. But there is, in fact, two different ways to engage in multiplayer wirelessly -- Nintendo's Protocol/Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. So one could conclude that we'll be seeing some possibilities for world-wide (or nation-wide) online gaming soon.

The article uses chess as an example of multiplayer gaming on cellular devices, but I don't really think that's a good example of how cellular multiplayer gaming would fail. I don't think the kind of people who are going to go out of their way to play games online in a true multiplayer fasion (no "shadow gaming" here) are going to be playing chess. Chess is time-consuming, chess is thought intensive, and chess is limited to two players.

UbiSoft's mobile game titles (Splinter Cell, Prince of Persia, XIII) are examples of where the mobile gaming industry is heading. A friend from my macroeconomics class use to spend the entire class playing UbiSoft's SC:Pandora Tomorrow on his Nokia cellphone, and the game looked surprisingly fun (despite lacking 3-D graphics). I can certainly see room for multiplayer for a game like that, and I imagine the same could be said for many mobile titles like it. But on a similar note, one could also point towards the upcoming Ghost Recon title for the bastard step-child of the taco-phone, which is a full, 3-D FPS. The game looks great, given its limited resources and the demo of online multiplayer on the Ngage's website looks fantastic.