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Cell Phone Games - Market or Mirage?
Rimbo writes "One popular view of the cellphone gaming industry is that it's the place where they exile people who couldn't cut it in the console and PC game industry. The other popular point of view is that with the huge volume of handsets everywhere, it's a market primed to explode. Today's Hit from the Wireless Pipe takes a look at some little-noticed details of the buyout that suggest that this is not the sign of the market maturing that many want it to be." Relatedly, that buyout was finally approved by the Jamdat Shareholders this past weekend.
While games on cell phones are alright as timewasters, I don't see any way that they're superior to the games kids write on their TI-83s when they get bored in high school. Anyone who wanted a really good portable game would probably buy a handheld device made specifically for that. Why would anyone think that there would be a big market here? I'd expect some hobbyist developer communities, but people actually trying to make big money off of it?
From a gamedesigner's view I think the mobile platform makes it possible to relive the 80's: A game can once again be made by one person, or very small teams.
With this, and the shorter development time, it makes it less risky to try out experimental concepts, and the limitations of the platform itself can also lead to some very original games: I've seen some great one/two button games out there, that are easy to be played on a mobile.
is on the crapper.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
One popular view of the cellphone gaming industry is that it's the place where they exile people who couldn't cut it in the console and PC game industry.
Ouch, that's harsh. Did anyone ever consider that the skills necessary for phone programming are just different than the skills required for PC and console game programming? I mean, the latter categories have gobs of memory and CPU to play with. The former has to fit as much as possible in anywhere from 4 to 64 kilobytes. The gaming market hasn't seen requirements that harsh since Atari was king. (Even the NES regularly went beyond those limits.)
The other popular point of view is that with the huge volume of handsets everywhere, it's a market primed to explode.
Uhh, no. That view doesn't fly either.
Let me explain the market:
- Millions (billions?) of people have handsets.
- A large percentage of those have "downtime" that they want to fill with something interesting. (e.g. The bus, train, long car trips, etc.)
- To fill that downtime, a percentage of those people turn to quick games that they can play for a few minutes.
And that, my friends, is the market in a nutshell. The part that handheld game makers seem to keep missing is that players don't want immersive, long lasting gaming. They want to pull out Pacman, Solitare, Space Invaders, or some other quick game to pass the time. The moment that niche of time is completed, the game gets turned off. Thus the following information has been percolating to the market:
- "Classic" games sell best.
- Price points must be low because players don't want to spend much money to fill a little time.
- Consumers don't buy new handsets just for the games. They buy games for the handsets.
Or in other words, phone gaming is the ultimate in "Casual" gaming. (Please read up on what casual gaming is before you reply that you're a casual gamer. Thank you.) Anyone who bets their company on the idea that phone players want more than a casual gaming experience is bound to lose. Period, end of story.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
on my Motorola A1000, that I bought from my provider during a sale for £1.
I guess I got my value out of it, but the phone controls are inadequate for platform games. However they're good enough to play Heretic with, less fine tuning required I guess.
For part time projects for programmers though, they're a great industry to get into. You don't have to learn complex 3D APIs, or spend months writing a bare game. You can do the bare game in a few evenings, create a few useful libraries for 2D gaming, write the game (80's style 8-bit ports usually) in a few more, and give it to your friends, or even see if you can sell it via a network provider and get a few quid back for your efforts.
Well, actually, I bet you could do a game that matches any Atari ST or Amiga game actually - you can do quite a lot with a >100MHz ARM processor, even if it is running a JVM. Smooth scrolling and lots of action certainly works (at 320x208 on my A1000), and I've seen parallax scrolling done as well.
The only difficulty with it for casual programmers is that each mobile platform needs its own customisation for the game - different screen sizes, processing capabilities (no parallax scrolling on the lower end hardware), etc. Which takes a lot of time if you want to spread the game wide and far.
is it just me or does there not seem to be the delivery methods in place to facilitate such an "explosion" in the market? i used to use a contract phone, which was fine for getting games, if i wanted to wait ages while it downloaded. paying all the while not only for the game itself, but the connection time while it was downloading. i now use a prepay phone (i dont use the phone that much and the contract was just useless) and it seems my options are limited. the only way i know of to get games without a lot of hassle is to text one of these shortcode using companies. i dont want to get tied into a weekly service that i have to pay £3-£4 a week for the priveledge of games that i dont want. i use a nokia 6600, which has bluetooth / IR and an SD flash card. none of which i have the connections / reader for on my computer. what i would like to see is stalls set up in shops like music stores that can send you games over bluetooth or text message for a small fee. (for example you insert a few pounds into the machine and give it your number, or something like that).
Te audire no possum. Musa sapientum fixa est in aure.
IMO here are some good pocket PC games (I have a pocket PC phone, the samsung i730).
Emulators:
Morphgear (tg-16 module) for devil's crush pinball (highly recommended)
PocketSNES: FF2+3
PocketNES
PocketPC Games:
4 pinball
Bounty Hunter pinball
GameBox Classics and GameBox Gems
Links
Mummy Maze
Age of Empires
Skyforce
Warfare Inc
Zuma
Baseball Addict
Soccer Addict
not on par with GBA games, but adequate and fun while you are waiting for anything, such as a passanger in a car, at a doctor's office, etc. I could bring my GBA with me, but I never do, and always have my cellphone with me.
JAMDAT has some nice looking smartphone games last time I checked.
Tell that to John Romero.
"Every time a bell rings, a Dell laptop bursts into flame."
When I worked for a mobile game company, I read the Jamdat S-1 (an SEC filing that goes with an IPO) because it was one of the few sources of hard numbers about the mobile game industry. I blogged my comments here: http://jamdats1blog.blogspot.com/
It comes down to that mobile games are a niche, but they are a niche in a stupendously huge market. Big enough that the first-tier mobile game publishers are on track to become as big as some console and PC game publishers.
Nobody has broken out of the niche yet, but it is likely that the products that do break out will come from a leading mobile publisher. EA was only in part buying Jamdat's performance in the niche. They also bought a better chance of breaking out, and of breaking out more explosively through Jamdat's well-developed channels.
The mobile channel is unique. While it can be frustrating making a buying descision on, if you are lucky, a couple screen-shots and a terse description, it is also a very low-friction channel. You carry the shop in your pocket, and you already have a billing relationship with the shop owner. In Verizon's mobile games channel, subscription pricing is common, and lucrative. Jamdat has global channel presence where EA previously had none in the mobile "walled garden."
I wrote parts of this stuff
Mirage.
Games I've got on my treo (purchased on sprint vision, autobilled to my phone bill)
- Bejeweled
- Pac man
- Ace Poker
- Galaga
I paid 15-20 for each, and they're all worth it (Sprint gives you like $15 a month in vision credits to blow on shit like this). The games are fun time wasters, and equally important, a great icebreaker. See an attractive lady next to you who looks as bored as you do? Bring up pac man with all the sounds and music. It'll get a smile.
On a more serious note, cell phone games are also simple and unintimidating enough for the larger market: adults, women, and younger children (a great way to get them to shut the hell up). At $15 a pop, with no game-specific hardware costs, why not?
OTOH, it's also a simple, humble, fun market. And for some reason, the MBAs think that this means it's another internet boom waiting to happen -- because, for them, everything's another internet boom waiting to happen. Fuck them and their booms. It's a simple, humble, fun market. There isn't enough money in it to spend millions on advertising (and hopefully there won't be for a long time), and apparently that's the big 'Mirage' of cell gaming. Again, fuck those idiots and their bubbles.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
Amen, it's a money sink. DO NOT buy the unlimted version (usually 3x monthly cost). You won't be playing it more than 3 months. On my current phone I tried "unknown" games.
EA Madden 2006: Gamepad to numberpad? Yeah, right. I could play Intellivision football with more precision.
Ys 1: Best game I've played so far, but that's not saying much. At least I could move my character reliably. But good luck getting more than 10 hours of gameplay.
Jamdat MLB 2005: It looks like baseball. You can control the location of your pitch. The rest is feels like you're just pretending to play.
Stick to Tetris and Bejeweled. Are those worth $700M?
There are many things that are different in making a cell phone game from a pc game. As the article says there are many different types of handsets, made by many different companies, on different platforms, to different specifications. Every game that is made for the cell phone has to be ported to each phone that it wants to target and that is a huge task in itself since the cell phone market has no specifications that they all have to follow like the pc market. When it comes right down to it, it becomes alot of time, money, and man power to test every phone that you want to use espically since the network carrier doesn't tend to help you at all.
:\
I will say this, people who do make games for cell phones tend to make cheap games that they can run through cheaply and quickly and then spend most of thier time on the porting process, I have had the chance to talk to quite a few big makers of cell phone games through a couple of conferences that I have gone through, mostly boring financial stuff trying to get money
Miadlo
[My phone] has 640x200x24 screen 200Mhz cpu, 32M SDRAM, 2G mmc capable storage with 90M flash built in and the ability to play ogg/aac/mp3 with high quality stereo. It already has SDL libraries and has doom and other major graphical platforming games ported.
So how did you convince your carrier to let you download programs to your phone instead of locking you into the limited selection of the carrier's online store? Or were you fortunate enough to have been born in Europe or east Asia instead of North America?
According to a survey I translated a couple of months back, in Japan amongst the people surveyed (who would tend to be heavy phone users, due to the survey methodology) almost 40% played games regularly, and amongst these gamers, over 40% paid to download games, and over 40% downloaded at least one game a month.
A game can once again be made by one person
How is this feasible for hobbyists if the major carriers require that one have a code signing license from a CA trusted by the carrier in order to test a program, and such licenses cost at least $500 per year?
I don't see any way that they're superior to the games kids write on their TI-83s when they get bored in high school.
I tried to make a Tetris clone on a TI-83 but it ran dog slow because of the limitations of the built-in programming language's interpreter.
Anyone who wanted a really good portable game would probably buy a handheld device made specifically for that.
Because of the lockout chip business model, there is no way to sell shareware or donation-supported free software for Nintendo or Sony handheld video game systems. Which device sold in the United States were you talking about?
Really, where do we get the insistence that phones, a perfectly utilitarian item, need to incorporate video players (which they do really poorly), games (which they also don't do very well), web browsers (oh, the pain), cameras (OK in a pinch, but still inferior) and music players...?
In the meantime I can't even make my Moto ring like a phone instead of playing some dreadful music.
We're rapidly reaching the point where manufacturers and cellular providers have stopped considering whether your phone will actually work as a phone.
Three Squirrels
On one hand I have a perfect port of Castlevania {I} on my phone. On the other, I was playing Madden 06, and the Ref calls out a pass interferance call on .... A RUNNING PLAY!!!!
Need for Speed Underground 2 is a decent port though.
So, I think the differance really is in the attention to detail. It looks as good or better than many NES games though.
Oh, the phone is a LG vx8100
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
... such as Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, you'd just about shit your pants. They're also cheap to produce. Take one coder, one designer, and one artist, give them two months, and they have another game. Keep that up and license some big names (as my earlier game show examples) and you have one winner after another.
Another thing to keep in mind: this industry's bread & butter is idiots who keep paying for subscribed cell phone games long after their initial purchase. When a $3 charge is added to an already long phone bill, many never notice. Enough of those make a pretty nice revenue stream.
One popular view of the cellphone gaming industry is that it's the place where they exile people who couldn't cut it in the console and PC game industry.
I resent that statement.
Take one coder, one designer, and one artist, give them two months, and they have another game.
3-4 months, and add 2-4 testers (but you get to share them across projects).
A---, Get back to work. We read this shit you know. You did sign an NDA.
Does anyone else question the legitimacy of "relatedly" as a word?
Trying to get a super fantastic MMOG onto a cell phone is probably a pipe dream with current technology but that doesn't mean one can't make cell phone games work.
Considering how a cell phone has a different human interface than a PSP and a DS, creating a game that is fun to play *and* is sane to control is a challenge but it is possible. This means that games like Battlefield 2 are probably not the best to put on a cell phone. However something more akin to Rub Rabbits, Wario Ware, or even Puzzle Pirates might be a better choice. A game that you can start simply by pulling our your phone in a place where you can't do much of anything else (picture a train or a bus), easily find another person close by to play, play a little, and then kill them game without much fuss (say someone's stop is close, having one person drop from the game should not kill the entire game for the others).
There's a few pretty good games for the cell phones. Fantasy Warrior is a nice Zelda style game with good graphics for a cell game. My mm-8300 is capable of putting out some decent 3D graphics as well.
This effectively makes mobile the worst of all worlds.
"One man" 80s-style development is a myth, because of the huge amount of porting and testing you need to do to effectively deploy a game. Sure you could just make your game for the RAZR, since that's a popular phone. But even then you're only hitting a small fraction of the market.
And with the poor design of most phone JVMs, plus the memory/JAR size limitations, you're still limited to doing basically Pac-Man.
BREW, despite all of its issues, is probably the most homogenous mobile game platform out right now, and is our last best hope for high quality mobile games. But BREW is expensive, proprietary and very hostile in general to hobbyists. Plus, it only has a ghost of the market share J2ME does right now.
When you actually do manage to make a mobile game, and market it, it does tend to sell well, because as someone else mentioned - it's a niche in a HUGE market. But until we see some better mobile app platform standards, and until phone manufacturers and carriers actually stick to them, that's all mobile gaming is going to be: a cynical money-grab from an audience who will, in large enough numbers, buy pretty much anything you crap out. Mobile is the new dot-com.
You forgot the "sold in retail stores nationwide" qualifier you usually add so again the answer is Game Park (GP32, GP2X).
The point is that I don't want my customers to have to buy a $200 device, be it a mail-order GSM phone or a mail-order imported Korean game system, just to play my $10 game. One solution is to bring in economies of scale by teaming up with other developers so that we could offer several shareware titles for a given platform; how would I start to organize that?
There are plenty of people outside the US willing to pay for cell phone games.
Enough to hire a translator to localize the game's text into each of several languages of East Asia and continental Europe?
I work for a mobile games company. I will tell you that the market is not a mirage.
It's completely unsubstantiated to say that people in this industry are people who could not cut it in the console/PC world. Tell that to:
* Trip Hawkins (a founder of EA)
* John Carmack (from Quake fame)
* All the major publishers who release mobile games along with console counterparts (THQ, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, etc).
* All the major publishers who are re-releasing their famous console games (Konami, Capcom, Namco, etc).
Successful people in the console/PC games market are looking for the best ways to get into the mobile games market evidenced, of course, by EA's huge buyout of Jamdat.
Even giving thought that mobile games are limited to being bad versions of the console counterparts is plain wrong. Look at Yahoo Mobile Games. Yahoo Games has an unbelievably large gaming market that has no interest in playing console games. Many of them (who have computers) also have cell phones, and play those games as time fillers at home would play the same games as time fillers on a bus ride.
I can't stand it when people think of something as a potential "bubble" so they think it's something from which to stay away. There was a dot-com bubble, but the Internet is still here and a growing market. The mobile application industry may be a bubble in the sense that there are some uneducated investors throwing money at half-baked developers, but that does not mean that there are no developers with solid business models and evidence of growing revenue. It is impossible to ignore the numbers. 193 million mobile handsets sold in the US alone in 2004 with a $345 million gaming market. This is doubled from the previous year.
I will say that the industry will change many times in the next few years. Executives at major console publishers will have to learn to change their expectations in capabilities ("Why can't we make Need for Speed Underground on a device with 243 kB of RAM?"). Designers will have to come up with ideas to take advantage of networking/GPS capabilities unique to mobile. Independent developers will all die out without huge venture capital, big-name licenses, or big-name publishers to get carriers to put their games in their catalogs. The industry will think of better ways to sell games instead of "Pay me $5.99 for this game that you may only play once because it sucks," you'll see more of, "Thanks for buying the *INSERT NEXT BIG TOM CRUISE MOVIE* DVD/Theatre ticket, here is your link to download the mobile game! I hope you play it and other people see you playing it and give us more publicity for the movie!" Or in better networking environments, you'll see exactly what Flash game portals do and offer games for free if you look at an advertisement for 3 seconds.
Anyone who thinks the industry is limited has not enough exposure to the industry or is not imaginative enough.