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.

Comments

Let's relive the 80's

[88NoSoup4U88]

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.

Re:Let's relive the 80's

[TheNoxx]

Uh, the same if not much more than people make from the whole ringtones rackett... huge market, almost non-existant developement time and costs compared to games for consoles, extremly accessible... so yeah, a good wad of cash or two.

Re:Let's relive the 80's

[DZign]

The number of people who are smart enough to download a game from a website and install it (through a specially bought bluetooth adaptor or cable to their pc) is very small.

The market of 'dumb' people who are just consumers and will pay to download a game is much, much bigger. Most of these games (together with ringtones, wallpapers, ..) are marketed through ads in magazines.

Cell phone games are definitely a business. I know someone who has a company doing it, he employs a few developers and it seems they're doing well (at least I think so, he just 'upgraded' his office and has a nice bmw x5..)

The only time I play cell phone games...

[RingDev]

is on the crapper.

-Rick

Opinion

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Re:Um...They're cell phones.

[TheRealDamion]

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.

I've got one purchased game

[hattig]

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.

Bring out your dead

[SoCalFatboy]

If you want to know anything more about the game, you're out six bucks. If you want to download a lot of games to find the gem, you're going to be dirt poor and playing a lot of crappy games.

Now take a look at some of Jamdat's top sellers: Bejeweled, Tetris, Bowling, Solitaire, Doom RPG. All of them existing properties. All of them known games.

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?

Lockout on cell phones

[tepples]

[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?

The market in Japan is huge

[KNicolson]

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.

Code signing?

[tepples]

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?

Re:Code signing?

[jonwil]

My Motorola e378i phone has no such requirements.
I can make whatever java applets I like and download them to the phone (although being an i-mode phone, I have to write the applets with the DoJa SDK and put them on a web page somewhere instead of writing them with the normal SDK and uploading them with MIDWay)

Even if you live in america, you can still get a phone (either one that doesnt require signing or one that can be modified to not require signing). Some carriers (generally GSM carriers) dont require signing. Plus, you can always buy an unlocked non-carrier GSM phone and a GSM sim cart from the carrier of your choice and use that. Or you can buy a phone (from a carrier or otherwise) and modify or replace the software (either hacking it to remove the signature check or replacing the whole phone software with something that doesnt check signatures). Motorolas are particularly good when it comes to modifications (I should know, I own one :)

Lockout chip business model

[tepples]

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?

Re:... and let's toss in a blender and toaster...

[fwitness]

I was annoyed by my silly "ring tones" also, and pretty much everyone elses out there. So I recorded a .wav of me saying "ring" in the dullest voice I could muster every three seconds or so and uploaded to my phone as an mp3. Take that The Man!