Are Mobile Carriers Slowing Down The Mobile Games Market?

Thanks to Water Cooler Games for its discussion on whether the U.S. mobile carriers' business practices are slowing down the growth of phone gaming. The author discusses a myriad of problems with upgrading his phone through his current carrier within an existing service contract, agreeing: "I understand that the carriers subsidize handset purchases as loss-leaders for service revenue", but going on to argue: "So, why is this a problem for mobile gaming? Because mobile gaming is still undergoing significant growth at the technology base. I can't run Symbian apps on my 6610. I can't run Series 60 apps. I simply need a new phone if I want to get serious about mobile gaming." Are these types of problems the ones stopping mobile phone gaming from taking off in the States?

how about becouse

we have dedicated systems for on the go gaming. And a cellphone pad makes a really lousy conroller for the most part my phone came with some games and they a pain in the ass to control.

Cry me a river

Mobile gaming is stalled in the US where mobile infrastructure is fragmented and poor. Online gaming is all but nonexistent in Australia where broadband is a joke. So what if you can't run game X on your phone? If all phones where the same you'd say there's on choice.

Re:Cry me a river

Let's see; you can't easily switch providers because they all use different technologies, if you move outside the area where you bought your phone you can't get a service either because the standards are different or there's no roaming agreement with the service provider in that area.

If our infastructure is so "poor", then why does 50% of the nation have wireless service?

That's a pretty poor coverage rate.

I don't know why you're so defensive. US mobile phone service is simply lagging behind many western (and eastern) countries because that's the way things happened this time. You can't be the world leader in everything.

Gaming mobile?

I don't know about the States, but even though here in Europe people do have phones they could play games on, I hardly know anybody that does so. Say you enjoyed Tony Hawks on your [PS2/XBox/PC/whatever], then you'll most likely go rolling on the floor laughing when you see the phone version...

Are there any games that are worth buying an expensive phone for?

The biggest threat to US mobile gaming

The biggest threat to US mobile gaming is I smacking the mobile gamer on the head for being an idiot. Get a goddamn handheld game and keep it separate from your phone. You know why? Because you end up paying more if you don't. And more importantly, I end up paying more for my just-for-telephone-calls phone.

Mobile Gaming in Japan

It was a little while back but Docomo brought out the new 3G phones (FOMA 900) and one of the models came pre-installed with Final Fantasy. For the price of $150 give or take it is a pretty good deal.

What about Bluetooth?

Phones don't need games - they need Bluetooth.

This way the phone can stick to doing what it does best - as a god-damned communications device. I'm probably going to be dropping SprintPCS in a few months because they have no phones with Bluetooth support. And I'm starting to gradually collect Bluetooth devices that do support it. My notebook computer has it built-in and the next generation of portable game machines (Nintendo DS, Sony PSP) are likely to have Bluetooth support - as PDAs have had for a while now.

I'd upgrade to a new Sprint phone with all the fancy features and probably with the ability to play games simply if it had Bluetooth support. But instead, I'm going to jump networks to one that's sane.

No, they aren't

The problem, as always, is that mobile gaming is a technological solution in search of a problem. And it's not even a full solution at that. For the price of a top of the line phone, you can now get a handheld game platform w/ awful controls that can also do phonecalls if you try really hard. Not a good bargain by any standards.

That's one reason...

Here are some reasons why mobile gaming hasn't taken off yet in the US. I speak from experience with my Sony-Ericsson T610 with T-Mobile service with unlimited GPRS data. It's not a smartphone, but it does have a Java VM and Mophun support.

• Phone hardware not optimized for gaming. Lack of sprite/tile/3D hardware support. Keypad buttons specifically designed to be hard to press (to avoid inadvertent keypresses).
• Myriad different phones. This means two major games platforms, Mophun and Java, are based on slower interpreted bytecode. (On a real computer nowadays algorithmic design determines speed - i.e. an O(n) algorithm in Java will run significantly faster than an O(n^2) one in C - but phones are so slow that coding on the bare metal is justified.) This means that the same game must run on various different phones. Imagine how crappy GBA games would be if there were 20 different GBAs, all with different screen sizes and key layouts.
• Not enough memory on the phone to store many games. The 1MB flash RAM on my T610 would be plenty if it were dedicated to games but the phone's firmware keeps a bunch of crap in it too. And sometimes I use the shitty onboard camera because I forgot to bring a real one, so those pictures need to be stored.
• It's a pain to put games on the phone, which is pathetic when the device is specifically designed to download data off the air.
• Should be easy to pause and resume games without state loss - so you can take phone calls while playing, or stop playing when you reach your subway stop. This should be instantaneous.
• Don't even talk about WAP games. They suck - slow and hard to use.
• No hype machine in the press for phone games.
• I don't think the quality of the games themselves has much to do with it - hell, Mary Kate and Ashley games sell.

Why Mobile Games aren't Taking Off

- The GBA is $99. It has a large screen, game-optimized platform (sprite processing, etc.), and good battery life.
- A good mobile phone (Nokia 3660 - Series 60) runs that much, but you have to sign up for a year of wireless service.
- There's no standardized platform. Different CPU speeds, different resolutions, different controls.
- There's no easy, standard way to get a lot of data quickly. A GBA cart can hold 256Mb (32MB). Try downloading *that* over GPRS.
- Many phones are seriously short on memory.
- Many phones are slow.
- Many phones don't have stereo sound.
- Most phones have an (evil) portrait LCD orientation.
- The GBA has tons of great games.

It's not the carriers. I can walk into the T-Mobile store and buy a 3660 right now for $99. It is a Series 60 phone with lots of memory, a big screen, a fast processor and an SD card slot.

It's the games, stupid! You can't get Mario Kart for a mobile phone. Nor can you pick up the excellent "Kirby's Block Ball" for $5 at the local used games store.

Verizon Wireless are also stupid

If you are on Verizon Wireless, the largest US carrier with around 35m subscribers you can see further examples of stupidity. They have a fantastic infrastructure and you can do data at 150kbps (max, typical is 70-115kps, I always have 115). They will be rolling out EVDO later this year which maxes at 3MBPS, typical speed of 500kbps.

On their phones they chose to do Brew which is a binary based environment. You compile up your C/C++ apps against the API and they will run on any Brew phone (in theory). However Qualcomm, the purveyor of Brew, decided they didn't want just anyone to write Brew apps. You have to get a dev kit from them (with a license that makes Microsoft look like good guys), you have to have the app certified, and you have to have it approved by the carrier. Finally it gets distributed by the carrier for a fee to subscribers - the carrier gets 10%, Qualcomm gets 10% and the developer gets 80%. You cannot make free applications for this platform - it costs around $6000 a year just to have an app and they can only be distributed by the carrier.

And of course binaries are not portable between phones even if that is the intention as there are enough phone specific differences and quirks.

So as a customer you can download apps really quickly (just a few seconds), but you get to pay $3 to $5 per month to subscribe to each app, or you can buy them outright for $8 to $10 each. Most do not have free previews, and those that do are largely terrible. I assume the rest are just as bad as their descriptions are useless. The games are also tied to your phone. If you get a new phone you cannot transfer them, you have to buy them all again.

It is a shame to see so much potential wasted just because the carrier and their technology provider decided to erect barriers and impose such ridiculous costs when they have such a lead in network infrastructure.

Colin Fahey has an excellent page [colinfahey.com] about J2ME vs Brew and how restrictive all the carriers are.

Just to give you an idea, here are some of the items showing up when I browse. Note that none of them have a free preview so you have no idea what they actually do without paying.

• NASCAR.COM: Provide real time information about NASCAR news, schedules, standings, races .... $10.49 per month.
• Around the world in 80 days: Based on Jackie Chan movie ... $2.49 monthly subscription, $5.99 unlimited use.
• Pink Panther Freeze Tag: The Pink Panther and friends are loose in this exciting game. Can you handle the pressure and tag them all? $1.99 monthly, $4.99 unlimited use.
• YAMAHA Ringtones: An application that allows browsing, managing and downloading of ringtones. $1.99 1 use, $6.99 6 uses. (No clue as to where the ringtones come from, if you can supply your own etc)
• Pandora Tomorrow: Splinter Cell furtive gameplay. $3.25 monthly, $7.49 unlimited

Maybe the games aren't just "furtive" enough?

Talking about smartphones

They have one big advantage - Symbian OS still quite open platform. With GBA developer need corporate-scale money to license a game. With Symbian it's free (At least until "Symbian Signed" certification becoume mandatory). That mean there is a lot of hobby and part-time developers cranking 5-10$ games and of cause a lot of freeware. About controls and rendering quality - Of cause if yoy would try direct port of console/GBA to phone you get crap. Smartphones need games designed from the ground with controls and vertical screen in mind. Rendering quality could be quite good with carefull programming (even 3d). Check N-Gage titles - N-Gage have no dedicated graphics hardware, all N-Gage have is exactly the same CPU as Nokia 3600/3650 - 6600 (different RAM of cause, but that is not a limiting factor) So on common smartphone you can have N-Gage quality games, and some of them not so bad. IMO what stalling mobile games is not platform limitations, but low market penetration of smartphones themself (I suspect that the number of smartphone hobby devlopers not much less then number of smartphone gamers for now). Smartphones themselfs are the problem, most people can't figure what they are useful for...

You want serious gaming on a mobile ?!

Get an N-gage man !

Ohwait...