Two interesting announcements from mobile game publishers this week have spoken volumes about how far the industry has come over the last year or so. On Monday, Germany's Handy Games revealed that it would be porting its key games to the Nintendo DS. No specific titles have been mentioned, but the company's brilliant strategy sim Townsmen 5, easily comparable with the DS conversions of Settlers and Age of Empires, must be at the top of the list. This, of course, follows Fountainhead's decision to convert its mobile RPG, Orcs 'n' Elves, to DS late last year.
And yesterday, another veteran mobile developer, Gameloft, launched its mobile brain training title, Brain Challenge onto Xbox Live Arcade - the first game of its type on the console. The title offers a daily collection of challenges split into five categories - Visual, Memory, Logic, Math and Focus. The XBLA version also features an exclusive card-based multiplayer challenge.
So what does all this mean for the wider industry?
Certainly, the technological gap between dedicated handheld consoles and mobile phones is narrowing. For several years, the big mobile manufacturers have been putting reasonably powerful 3D graphics chips into their high-end devices with the likes of Nvidia, ATI and Imagination Technologies, all supplying versions of their PC graphics acceleration technologies. And last month, mobile CPU manufacturer Arm announced a new piece of software, which fully utilises OpenGL ES 2.0 to allow the porting of even next generation console titles to mobile phones, albeit in stripped down versions.
But really, this isn't about graphics technology, or about pulling down games from PS3. The rise of casual gaming, together with the proliferation of games-capable devices - from iPods to set-top boxes - has created a new language, a new psychology of mainstream game development. Titles like SolaRola, Puzzle Quest, Bejeweled, Tower Bloxx and Tower Defense have a universal appeal that doesn't rely on the traditional games industry's macho notions of continuing graphical advancement. They look great within their own context.
Mobile phones, iPod, XBLA, Android - they're all part of a new ecology of game development and distribution. Of course, the big publishers are keen to get involved - EA and Eidos, for example, both have specialist casual/new media departments - but you'll also find the likes of Gameloft and Handy Games taking a more prominent role in the future of platform-agnostic development.
The future of gaming as a mass entertainment medium might not be about big, massively marketed event releases, it might be more like the PC casual gaming scene - with genres rising and falling, as fads swoop through cyberspace and across connected handheld devices. It's been simmering for a while, but now things are really taking off: games, like everything else, are going long tail.
