Mobile Entertainment

In a recent survey, only 10 per cent of West European respondents said they used mobile gaming services and downloaded games at least once a month. It’s a disappointing figure, because the popularity of gaming in general continues to increase, with the revenue generated by console-based games set to outperform the film industry both in the UK and the US for the first time in 2007.

Small screens, battery drain and fiddly input devices have hampered mobile gaming development, but the real problem has been the incompatibility between different devices. This has led to fragmentation and little opportunity for publishers to see a return on investment. And while there is increasing collaboration between handset manufacturers, operators and games developers to improve the experience, the market could go much further.

In 2009, the industry will ship an estimated 1.267 billion new handsets (source: Nomura), so there is a massive opportunity for mobile gaming. While higher end handsets can support good gaming, the best experience can only be fully extracted with games written in C and C++. Java is limited – and it’s not as portable as the market had expected, so games designed from entry-level upwards have to be separately ported to every phone platform and as such the economics simply don’t add up.

So why not replicate the successful business models deployed within the console market? This means enabling publishers to differentiate their games, using C/C++ and their own proprietary middleware, sending new levels and functionality to deployed devices, and with the added benefits from deployment across different devices with just a single executable. This way, consumers will be able to carry their content across devices in much the same way that they can move their music across their device portfolio, and they’ll be able to share their games with friends who run with entirely different devices. A ubiquitous native deployment would mean publishers would finally be able to combine a large addressable market with their own differentiated offerings.

The Antix Game Player can resolve this fragmentation. Its player has been developed to enable C/C++ games to run across mobile phones and other devices such as Set Top Boxes (STBs) and Digital Televisions (DTVs) with a minimal number of SKUs. This means that game developers can focus their resources on game development rather than porting. They can also use their existing game engine/middleware and industry standard API’s such as OpenKODE and OpenGL ES.

To develop games for Antix Game Player developers need to access the Antix Game Development Kit (available via registration into the Antix Developer Program on antixlabs.com). From the consumers’ perspective the Antix player will either already be loaded on the device at time of purchase or it can be downloaded or installed from physical media such as SD Cards.

But can the consumers be won over? The trade must work together to boost the user experience – with free games on the phone at purchase, simple ways to find content, simple ways to download and install games, ‘try-before-you-buy’ and so on. The market needs to ‘think consumer’. This replicates the proven, highly successful approach that was used to generate the massive consumer demand for ringtones.

Only by combining an improved user experience and innovative methods of delivering games across increasingly converged platforms, will consumers start to gain faith in mobile gaming. With that and the reduced cost of deployment, the trade will finally begin to reap the rewards of a new revenue stream.