cell phones

Mobile Session Itself Goes Massively Multiplayer

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by [name redacted]

Going by the online schedule, Gamevil, Inc. general manager Kyu C. Lee was to spend an hour chatting about mobile MMO games and communities, by way of his mobile MMO game, Path of a Warrior – in North Hall room 124, at 2:00.

In practice, the session was held in a completely different building and Mr. Lee was absent. With the blessing of the sound and technical staff, however, the small turnout soon took command, converting the session into an informal comparison of notes.

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Audience Cheers And Jeers Mobile Innovation Hunt

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by [name redacted]

Co-host Matthew Bellows apologized up-front for only selecting fifteen finalists, citing time concerns. After repeatedly assuring that everyone had enough beer to drink, Bellows explained the setup: in turn, each developer would explain to the audience what made his or her game so innovative; if he or she went on too long, the audience would razz him or her by flapping its noisemakers. The audience showed immediate enthusiasm for this plan.

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Nokia’s Sauter Talks Next Generation N-Gage

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by [name redacted]

Two years ago, at E3, Nokia announced a strategic withdrawal from the handheld arena; in place of a discrete handheld platform, future N*Gage hardware would be incorporated into Nokia’s full line of mobile devices. Today, Nokia director of publishing Gregg Sauter elaborated on the plans.

Sauter expressed concern that the mobile game industry, in its current form, is “immature”. As the largest manufacturer of mobile devices, in particular “convergent” ones, Nokia feels in a position to revolutionize the industry in this regard. “We really need to evolve this industry,” said Sauter, explaining that Nokia is in the middle of an essential transition from “a company that makes hardware to one that provides experiences.”

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The Future of Mobile Gaming and its Enemies

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by [name redacted]

EA Mobile senior VP (and former JAMDAT CEO) Mitch Lasky kicked off his keynote at the GDC Mobile segment of Game Developers Conference 2006 with an extended spiel about his history with JAMDAT Mobile, the changing fabric of the industry, and what he sees as the biggest obstacles (and avenues) to future growth and maturation.

According to Lasky, one of the biggest forces for change has been his own company, JAMDAT — and in its current form, as the mobile division of Electronic Arts, Lasky sees it as perhaps the most important force for future change.

Lasky explained how Jamdat went, as he put it, from a value of zero to $684,000,000 in six years. When they began, they were a team of six people; previous to the EA merger two months back, JAMDAT was already the biggest mobile publisher. To contrast, The amount EA paid for JAMDAT is five times greater than Maxis fetched, making it the biggest EA transaction to date.

Of course with this kind of growth, it is only natural for other developers to go public in search of similar success. Lasky suggested the search was ultimately futile, as at the time JAMDAT went public it was “fundamentally different.”

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Global Mobile Games: New Business Models, Hit Games, and Mobile People from Around the Planet

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by [name redacted]

Current rumbling in the design community suggests that mobile games have yet to find their real application, and most games for the platform are just ports of established console or handheld ideas; they aren’t really based on the intrinsic character of the mobile platform. Taking in mind the control problems, the group began to discuss new ways the platform provided to interface with a game. Perhaps the camera could be used to sense rotation, so the user could swing the phone like a golf club. Some phones have rotation, stroke, and squeeze sensors that could be put to use.

Someone then observed that a game that requires a camera would have trouble getting “live;” not all phones have cameras. The only way to get carriers to support a game is if you design it for the lowest common denominator, technologically. Bringing carriers into the conversation set off a chorus of groans. Someone noted that carriers do not, really, understand content, and wondered whether not going straight to a carrier – rather, developing for a publisher that was in a position to negotiate with carriers – would give developers more freedom to push the envelope; to develop less “safe” games.

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