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

will it?

[gl4ss]

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.

has been there for years now

[drfrog]

airg.ca, a company i worked for, has had a civilization type game available via wap for years now