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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.
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.
Mine 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. This is not uncommon for newer phones, the 9300i which I believe is expected in about 2 months will be even more powerful, with 54M wifi, in only 11cm x 4cm x 1.8cm form factor, ssh (via putty) making it possibly the most useful device in the known universe to a unixy geek.
Anyway despite all of this, and the 3year old desktop PC specs, the main games I play are simple puzzle and card games. But note, I play these _AN_ _AWFUL_ _LOT_. Also despite being an open source fan, somebody who has almost never had a need to purchase software, I did pay for RayMan on the 9210 and it was fantastic.
I definitely believe there is a market for phone games, especially simple fun playable puzzle games.
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.
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?
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.