The Future of Mobile Games
I was in Japan last week to give a talk on the subject above. I thought I would summarize the talk here for all to enjoy. The audience was a large room full of Japan's best mobile game developers. It is somewhat ironic that a technologist like myself would be giving this talk to this audience, but on a certain level it makes sense. Most game developers are single-mindedly focused on their task at hand - creating a great game. They rarely have the time to peek their heads up and take a survey of what is happening around them. I, on the other hand, spend large chunks of time talking to game developers, game publishers, infrastructure providers and telcos. That does give me a somewhat unique view of the world.
This particular talk included no rocket science, and if you look at what is happening in the industry, the conclusions are pretty obvious. Sometimes, though, you need someone to state the obvious.
First, let's acknowledge the obvious. The mobile games industry is booming and is very successful. All of this success is built on the basis of single player sprite based games that have one sole purpose - to waist time - usually in increments of 5-10 minutes. The technology is both sophisticated and primitive at the same time. All rendering is software, but the ability to create such small form factors and manage battery life is truly amazing. We are starting to see some technological advances - like the ability to do software 3D rendering and getting better pixels (more with more color), but the real revolution is about to begin.
There are two forces acting simultaneously which are pushing us into a revolution in mobile games. The first is the rapid innovation in mobile hardware, and the second is the fact that gameplay is moving to the network. First let's look at the devices.
Not so long from now, you will have in your hand a cell phone with all the processing and graphics power of a game console. 2D/3D graphics hardware is starting to deploy in devices. Processors are getting faster. Memory is expanding rapidly. And network technologies are giving us bandwidth and latency characteristics that we have never seen in a mobile device. These device developments are wonderful for us technology geeks, but the real value is going to be realized by what you can do with all that power. Content is still king. And the content is moving to the network.
I often say that single player downloadable content is a saturated market. That is of course somewhat of an exaggeration, but has some truth to it. How many more single player retro/puzzle/board games can the market actually accept. This is especially true when you look at the characteristics of the mobile device. It is a communication device. It is intended to keep you connected to your community. That community could be your family, friends, or just a group of folks that like to play chess. When mobile games embrace this fact, the real explosion will happen.
Here are three concrete aspects of this revolution that will soon emerge. First, and likely the first to happen, will be the emergence of casual mobile online game communities. These will be the close cousin of the desktop communities such as Yahoo Games, pogo.com, and popcap. Just as there are millions of people playing casual desktop games from their web browser, there will be even more people playing these casual games through their casual mobile games communities. Second will be the real time massively multiplayer mobile games. Pocket Kingdom is a good example of this. The largest allure of massively multiplayer games is social interaction, and the most pervasive social device is the most obvious platform for this type of experience. The third example that I will give is multi-device gameplay experiences. The average player of Everquest playes over 20 hours a week. That is all tied to the users desktop. Imagine if components of that game - chat, trading, character management - were available to the players as a service on a mobile device. A service that allows them to continue their addiction unteathered from their desktop.
I have no doubts that over the next two years, mobile games will move to the network. The great news is that there will be an opportunity for the content developers to get a better share of the revenue from this revolution which will allow for much more fuel for the growth.
Almost everyone I share this vision with accepts that this is very likely, so all that is left to do is make it happen. Let's get to work.
Posted at 12:23PM Jan 31, 2005 by dtwilleager in General | Comments[0]
A Different Kind of Game
Hello again. I love the holiday break at Sun. It gives us all a chance to turn the engines on idle and forget about all of this techno babble for a while. It also gave me a chance to finish Half-Life 2 and Far Cry. More about that some other time. Other that the usual resolutions, I do resolve to blog more. :^)
Right before the break I attended Interservice/Industry Training Simulation & Education Conference (I/ITSEC for short). In a nutshell, this the conference where all the training and education divisions of the military come together to discuss how to best train our military. This conference has long been know in the simulation and visualization industries. The military has been using computer generated imaging for many many moons to train our military. It used to be focused on flight simulators, but has now expanded dramatically. I knew that from a graphics perspective it would be very interesting, but my real quest was to look for game technologies in use.
It is very well known that the military produced the game America's Army. They did it as a recruiting tool - and it was extremely successful. Now it was time to see if they were using it for other purposes. The answer is a definite yes. The show floor is certainly not as glitzy as E3, but there are still games everywhere - just different kinds of games.
The games that are played have expanded dramatically. It used to be that the military used flight simulator types of games for training. It has now expanded to include urban training, group training, and even massive multiplayer distributed training. They have gone from flight simulators to what the great game designer Warren Spector termed immersive simulations. There were single player simulations. There were simulations that had small teams playing together where each member had a different role. There is also a new project being started called Darwars - which is the first massive multiplayer training simulations.
All of these simulations are using various forms of game technologies. Some are using modified versions of the America's Army engine. Some are using new game rendering engines. And still others are using games middleware. There are a couple of differences between these games, and the ones you find at your local retailers. First is the input devices. Only full mock-ups will do here. I have never heard so much machine gun fire before - and more than I would want to. Full all terrain vehicles for the drivers. And, some of the most sophisticated motion simulators I have ever seen. The other difference between these games and consumers is of course the simulations themselves. This is training you know.
This brings me to the two most talked about problems of the show - standards and information flow. It is very hard to get all the simulation software to work together on the same data. A good example is terrain data. Many simulations have their own custom way of processing it. This makes it very difficult to get simulations to work together. Another big topic was information feedback. Because of our current world situation, many things were focused on urban warfare. The military needs systems that can take real life scenarios and feed those back into training simulations. This needs to happen at an incredibly fast rate. The engagements and tactics are changing so quickly that each day or even hour new information needs to be fed into the whole feedback loop. The lack of this put many at risk.
Most of my work focuses on the more enjoyable things in life, but it is very sobering to go to a conference like this and see human experiences put into such a controlled environment. I guess that is the nature of that industry.
I am off to CES tonight, so I promise something more "fun" next time. :^)
Posted at 01:44PM Jan 04, 2005 by dtwilleager in General | Comments[0]