What might Android do for mobile gaming? Look to Tokyo! : OHAdev.com


Nov

11

What might Android do for mobile gaming? Look to Tokyo!

Posted by Will at 21:40 | Filed In blog, games

I currently work as a game developer at Javaground, a mobile phone game company based in Southern California. My coworkers and I are all well aware of Google’s Android announcement, and I’m sure everyone in the mobile game industry is waiting with baited breath to get their hands on the “early look at the Android™ SDK” announced to be released into the wild tomorrow, November 12. With a very ambitious press release and such a huge consortium of industry players (and with the industry giants notably absent from the Alliance), all of us game developer types are all wondering one thing: What could Android possibly do for mobile gaming?

First of all, let’s face it, cell phone games in the US and Europe are still, for the most part, pretty terrible. They’re expensive little accessories to alleviate boredom and, like wallpapers and ringtones, the only reason you’re paying so much for them (if you’re wasting your money at all) is because that’s all the carriers will allow you to have on their phone. “What ever happened to free cell phone games?” asks Slate’s Justin Peters. Very good question - I found the beginnings of my answer in Japan.

Tales from Tokyo

I had the opportunity this fall to attend the Tokyo Game Show 2007 (wp), and a couple of things really surprised me there that you don’t really see mentioned at all in the typical gamer media, with their obsession over booth babes and frenzied coverage of big-budget game releases and announcements. First, a significant portion of the show was focused on mobile games. I knew that cell phones and their games were ubiquitous in Japan, but I was still incredibly amazed at how much attention and floor space mobile games received relative to their console counterparts. Stuff like Namco’s Katamari Damacy Mobile seemed to be actually drawing a fair amount of attention relative to the big mega-blockbusters and the standard portable consoles.

The other surprise came from my discovery of a table, rather prominently located on the back side of the Japan Game Awards voting booth, displaying the winning entries of an amateur mobile phone game development competition. I was floored - here I was, surrounded by the game industry giants going all out to capture the attention of the gaming public with huge cinematic sensory overload, and over there are a couple of computer science students showing off their little IT university projects on cell phones! My conversation with one of the amateur game-makers, Hisao, was even more fascinating. I talked with him for a bit about the state of the mobile game industry in Japan, and it turns out that the environment is much more open to amateur game development. Instead of restricting access to outside games in order to capitalize on overpriced games and exclusive deals with licensed publishers, Japan’s mobile game market has developed in the other direction towards making sure their phones could play as many games as possible, and even funding cutting-edge game development in order to push the limits of the phone hardware to show off new features and capabilities of the devices themselves. David Collier’s GDC2003 presentation gives a pretty good overview of the way the Japanese mobile game industry structures its game offerings around unique, innovative and high-end uses of mobile technology.

Another really cool thing was how easy it was to market independent games. Check out Asobism’s game page for a typical example of the ubiquitous black-and-white download box. Snap a photo of this data-filled box with a Japanese cell phone, and it’ll take you straight to a URL where you can purchase/download the game. When I asked Hisao about how difficult it was to get carriers to publish independent games, he looked at me questioningly. “What do you mean? You just go to a site and download the game. Carriers don’t get in the way at all.”

Now, it’s not like Japan’s mobile game market is completely golden - carriers still use games, even free exclusive offerings, as a form of vendor lock-in because users are much more reluctant to swap phones once they’ve built up a good library of purchased or downloaded games that they don’t want to wipe clean. However, the innovation made possible by more open relationships between carriers and content does give us a good sense of the kinds of innovations that are possible for the mobile game industry if an open mobile platform manages to be successful in the Western markets, Android or otherwise.

An Open Gaming Platform

After looking at the vitality of the Japanese mobile game industry, particularly its independent developers, and in the jovial spirit of overexcited game blogger anticipation, let me offset some predictions of the future impact that an open mobile platform might have on mobile game development in the West:

  • Features and performance matter. Currently, phones in the West are marketed based on their looks, their carrier contracts and their call quality much more than their features and performance. Accordingly, games are marketed based almost entirely on their brand. The biggest offering an open mobile platform could bring to mobile games is a renewed freedom of, and consumer interest in, the hardware itself. This means games that will really push the limits of a phone’s processing and graphics power, games that take advantage of new gadgetry, games that gleefully gobble up wifi connections, and so on. No more “generic licensed game based on popular TV show of the month” or licensed Tetris games dominating the charts. No more games that look and feel the same whether your phone is brand new or 5 years old. Games that really push the limits of phone hardware will not only make people take mobile games more seriously, but it will also encourage consumers to select phones based on their capabilities rather than their contracts.
  • Open competition means increased innovation. With nowhere but the carrier’s deck to turn to when making a game purchase, mobile gamers are limited to playing what the carriers know will sell well, which usually translates to cheesy, derivative licensed games with instantly-recognizable 16-character titles. There are a few exceptions, but the fact is that successfully turning a profit on a mobile game basically requires the carrier’s permission to do so. With an open platform, one that would allow independently developed games to make full use of the phone hardware and be as easily accessible as commercial products, the increased competition would ultimately mean more innovative cell phone games as a whole.
  • Transparent hardware means easier development and optimization. Currently one of the greatest nightmares of mobile game development is porting to the hundreds of different devices on the market, all spanning an extremely wide range of screen sizes, device features and limitations, performance and memory sizes. While widespread adoption of a standard development kit could help overcome this hurdle for amateur developers (though it would be highly unlikely), even more frustrating is the lack of publicly available technical information about the phones out on the market so that any scalable features could be more quickly and accurately automated. Although it wouldn’t be the explicit promise of an SDK, it is my hope that a more open relationship to the phone hardware will encourage developer communities that openly share technical specs, device issues and bug workarounds so that a single piece of software will be able to run flawlessly on as many different phones as possible, with fewer bumps along the road than we see today.

Will any of these mobile gamer dreams become a reality with the OHA’s Android? We’ll have to wait until (at least) tomorrow to find out.

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