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Why Has No One Made a Great Gaming Phone?
andylim writes "According to Engadget, John Koller, Sony's head of PlayStation marketing, recently said that 'Apple's entrance into the portable gaming space has been a net positive for Sony. When people want a deeper, richer console, they start playing on a PSP.' What's odd though is that everyone knows that the mobile phone gaming market is a huge and yet neither Sony nor Nintendo has made a gaming phone yet. Recombu.com thinks that Nokia could enter the space with PSP-like devices and it has come up with a concept phone called the Ovi Orion, which would bridge the gap between phone and console, 'If the iPhone is Wii, then Ovi Orion would be Xbox and offer Xbox Live style features. A serious gaming phone for serious gamers.'"
Because phones are for TALKING. :P
There was a gaming phone a few years back. It flopped. No one revisited.
I have an ngage you insensitive clod!
The kids who play the games can't afford the service plans or phones themselves...
Most adults have other things to do, or more powerful systems at home to play "serious" games on.
But why not go the other way? Integrate phone capabilities to PSP or DS. It's a lot easier than creating a new platform which can never really live up to those two.
Nokia did already try it, but it lost to PSP and DS. It was semi-popular with guys in my country and at my age, but I didn't really felt like getting one. And there really wasn't any good games.
serious gaming? on a mobile device? c'mon. games on a phone are at best, distractions or time killers (babysitters).
the LAST thing I want to do is get heavy into a game and get a fucking call.
You can buy a DS/PSP without a freaking multi-year ass-rape contract.
Buying a gaming console should never be a long term financial decision.
Serious gamers use a PC. Anything else might as well be Learning with Elmo.
Not really. Phones and game devices use vastly different technology, and even more vastly different infrastructure. Infrastructure is the most complicated part of making phones. Working out networks, contracts, etc. By comparison, the infrastructure for game devices is a walk in the park. When you make a phone, you're somewhat beholden to the phone companies which hold all the cards. Game hardware manufacturers control their own infrastructures, like XBox Live and Playstation ("home" is it called? I don't have a PS3). Also, the interface designs and hardware functionality is quite different. It's not particularly intuitive to combine a phone with a gaming handheld and not lose a bit of one side in the process. You hold them differently, the speakers locations for each are not ideal for each other, handhelds usually sacrifice some portability for ergonomics, phones must maintain an even smaller form factor. The two are really very different devices. The fact that they have screens and are essentially computers is the only major similarities. The control systems that are typically ideal for handhelds don't really make much sense for a phone. So then you either have tacked-on gaming controls which take up more space than your phone functionality needs, or you sacrifice gaming control to make up for the portability that a phone needs.
That's why contextual control devices like the iPhone are probably the MOST ideal. They're deffinitely not perfect, but they do both things relatively well without sacrificing too much. Now its a up to the game manufacturers to create control systems that are ideal to the non-tactile nature of the device. For instance, I've played a few very playable platformers on the iPhone like Soosiz (which uses large virtual left, right and jump buttons), Bounce On (which utilizes the tilt functionality of the iPhone remarkably well, for control). But on the flip side, Sega's port of Sonic the Hedgehog (which simply places a tiny virtual D-Pad) is almost entirely unplayable. This isn't Apple's fault, it's Sony's fault. Bounce On and Soosiz are both very similar to Sonic, and they play extremely well, so it can be done.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Agreed. Many times, graphics isn't about how advanced your engine is, but how creative you are with it. Still, probably my favorite graphics of all time are Okami, a fairly mid-budget PS2 game that blows away the graphics of most 360 and PS3 titles I see. The creators decided to go in an incredibly artistic direction with their graphics, but did them in sutch a way that they didn't require a lot of horsepower. In fact, the shots of the DS sequel (yes, that's right, DS), is remarkably similar, and the DS is one of the most underpowered devices out there. It's not how advanced your graphical power is, it's what you do with it.
Golden Sun is a dream too.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Keep the cheap phones for making phone calls and the game computers for playing games.
One device for browsing the web, one for playing music, one for watching video, one for playing games, and one for making calls. Now your pockets are bulging, even if they are all tethered over Bluetooth. The only big benefit I can see of having several pocket-size devices is that the cheaper phones don't require a data plan, which means cheaper service if you don't make a lot of calls.
Different way to look at it: why do people want 50" plasma TV sets? Because they don't want to squint at a 7" or a 13" TV. I find watching a movie on the iPhone is equally disappointing. I can see the idea, I can understand the plot, I can hear the dialog, but I cannot get the experience.
So who wants to "game" on an iPhone? I'd never want to play Bioshock or Portal on the tiny screen. Bioshock would be exactly this scary: *boo*. Portal would be exactly this humorous: *ha ha*.
Different kinds of games such as solitare, sudoku, that kind of puzzle stuff, they're all great on the iPhone, because it's a different type of gaming. In real life nobody buys Scrabble HD Edition, or Wide Screen Edition Triominos. They're not needed. This is just the same thing in reverse.
John
So you're saying that Microsoft has been lying in its quarterly and annual reports to the SEC that show that unit losing millions of dollars since inception?
E pluribus unum
No you wouldn't. I consistantly look at my iPhone and MyTouch and wonder why no one is making a controller that the phone just slips into. The only problem with these devices for gaming is that they don't have physical buttons placed properly for gaming. So, make a 'case' that either connects via the data line, or via bluetooth that has proper buttons and directional pads. Have the controls and the audio pass through to the phone, and you now have a phone that is just as good for gaming as a dedicated gaming device.
This is why Sony nor Nintendo should be looking to create a gaming phone, they should be looking to create PSP/DS with phone capabilities. Otherwise it's just going to fail.
Actually, I really don't think so. The time will come where what you say is correct, but I believe now is not the time. Here's why.
Basically, both phones and portable game systems are, in terms of their hardware and software, and the expectations of the users, continually evolving. However, I think phones are still evolving faster than game systems. New telephony technologies continue to be rolled out, network coverage in the US is still inconsistent between carriers and spotty in some places, and the iPhone, which is the item by which most people have set their standards and expectations for a high-end phone, is at present just a few years old - and has already gone through a couple revisions. Compare this to Nintendo DS and Sony PSP: DS has gone through two major hardware revisions in five years, and only the most recent of those changed the hardware specs significantly. The situation for the PSP is similar: roughly the same amount of time, and a similar amount of change to the platform over time.
I think that combining a phone with a gaming device at this time would probably still be a bad idea. Turning a phone into a game platform involves more than adding game controls to it - it means turning it into a platform stable enough that players and game publishers will be willing to invest themselves in it. Game platforms stay the same for years so that publishers can make money on software. Phones, at present anyway, are still caught up in a mad rush to one-up one another. A game machine with phone capabilities could be good now, but a couple years down the road its capabilities as a phone would practically be a joke. This doesn't preclude establishing a stable game system as a subset of a particular phone line's capabilities - but then the "game platform" games would be inferior to the "phone native" games or something like that...
Bow-ties are cool.