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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?
yes.
will it probalby take couple of years more after it has already picked up at 'somewhere else'? yes as well, us isn't exactly on the frontier lines when it comes to cellphone connectivity which pretty much is what makes a cellphone worthwhile to have(around here people just don't get landlines anymore for phoning, there's just no point).
look, a simple chess game doesn't take that many kbytes to play and there's absolutely no need to play for example chess(or any other turn based game) in 'real time' so a tunnel doesn't really matter(besides, that tunnel should have have a cellphone ap in it anyways if your networks were up to scratch).
the biggest problem I currently see is the lag in gprs systems(and gprs being the only affordable way to move data to a cellphone at the moment in most places), which pretty much cancels playing doom or other hardcore fast action games over the gsm network.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
While gamers were walking though Brew 2004, they may have come upon our booth, Four Corners Development Group, where we were showing our Multiplayer Pool game that has been live on Verizon for 6 Months. While the press contemplates what some companies will do to solve the myriad of problems that exist with getting these games to work, some have already done it.
Looking forward, as carriers drop the data rates, I think we can expect more and more multiplayer games. A good question might be, will they be designed for the casual, mobile gamer?
airg.ca, a company i worked for, has had a civilization type game available via wap for years now
back in the day we didnt have no old school
To clarify (and potentially correct) what you're saying:
Nintendo DS has Wi-Fi for IP-based gaming and communication. That would imply that net-wide (room-wide or world-wide) multiplayer is possible using Wi-Fi. PSP also uses Wi-Fi.
Nintendo DS also has 16-player local wireless, that has very low power requirements. It can recognize when other Nintendo DS systems are in range, and can also wake from sleep mode to connect with systems that are sending out a "group format" signal. Range is about 100 feet. PSP has no low-power local wireless equivalent to this.
The rumor about Nintendo DS and Bluetooth came about in the press because some of the features of Nintendo's local wireless protocol bore a strong resemblance to those of Bluetooth. The rumor was dismissed during Nintendo's E3 2004 Pre-Show, during the segment announcing the Nintendo DS, its features, and some of the developers already working on games for it. Nintendo used the term, "proprietary application," to refer to their local wireless protocol.