For those of us who've been following the maddening world of mobile gaming for five years or more, it's interesting to watch the sector finally making an impact at industry events. Last year's E3 saw an enormous rise in mobile gaming exhibitors, and clearly, now GDC is being used as a platform for announcements and analysis.
Nokia, for example, used GDC to reveal its forthcoming next generation mobile games platform, due for launch next year. Burned a little by its experiences with the under-powered N-Gage but still aware of the importance of mobile entertainment, Nokia is looking to turn mobile handsets into user-friendly and powerful gaming devices.
User-friendliness appears to be a major theme at the event. In his keynote speech, Square Enix president Daishiro Okada talked about an 'entry barrier' to mobile games, with phone users often unable and unwilling to try them out. Judging by this news story on Gamesindustry.biz, his solutions weren't particularly helpful...
"The way to combat this, Okada believes, is to 'develop more killer apps and 'it' games which customers are willing to spend money on.'"
Cue a room full of mobile developers slapping their foreheads and exclaiming, "Darn it, why didn't I think of that?"
Also covered by Gamesindustry.biz, Dave Collier, CEO of Tokyo-based mobile content provider, Pikkie, gave a talk on the need for mobile developers to be innovative and to properly embrace the mobile platform, using the intrinsic communication and networking capabilities to create games that phone users want to play. He went onto highlight some examples, including the real-time online two-player version of Puzzle Bobble and EA's Need For Speed translation, which features downloadable content.
Collier is a great speaker - I caught him at several mobile industry events while he was working for Namco's mobile division - and his message to western mobile publishers has been the same for the last few years: try to be a bit like Korean and Japanese companies for whom technical innovation and kookie game design seem second nature. But there are key problems here. Developers in the west are yet to develop close working relationships with network operators, which makes it difficult to set up 'connected' elements beyond simple high-score tables. In Europe there are also massive issues with device and network fragmentation - too many different phones and too many different carriers to build effective massmarket online gaming systems. (Although infrastructure companies like Terraplay are trying and making inroads...)
There's also the cultural element - as we have seen with Game Boy and more recently DS, Japanese and Korean developers are just better at creating portable games. There is an understanding of 'kawai' graphics and experiences that western developers don't get because, often, they're too obsessed with mimicking console games and/or being cool.
Whatever, it's important for mobile gaming to gain a foothold in these major industry events. It is a modest shuffle in the right direction.
