What do future smartphones and other devices offer?
Much of the talk at Mobile Games Forum this week has focused on iPhone - with other smartphones coming into the debate only when being compared (often negatively) with Apple's handset.
Yet there's also been a sense that there's also a big opportunity on the way outside the App Store, as operators and other handset makers get their own app acts together.
A panel this afternoon at the conference dug into this, and related issues. John Chasey from Finblade and Metismo kicked off, pointing out that the single biggest change to the App Store since its launch is the huge competition.
"You can spend money, develop what is a very good title, launch it, and then have that title absolutely lost among the pure volume of content that's out there," he said.
So while the App Store is an excellent store in itself, the ferocious competition is a barrier to developers being confident of making decent revenues.
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Chasey predicted that a lot of developers will quit the App Store in 2010, after failing to make as much money as they had hoped - or indeed losing a lot of money on their expensively developed games.
So what are the alternatives? "Ovi Store has a lot of potential, purely because of Nokia's scale in the market," he said, while admitting that the store still has significant issues, including billing.
"Also the operators with big multinational operations, like Vodafone, have the reach of consumers. They may not have everything right today, but they have an opportunity to get in front of a lot of people."
So what are developers expecting from the operators? Tim Closs from Ideaworks Labs talked about fragmentation as one of the key missing pieces in non-Apple app stores. "The smart network operators and smart OEMs are looking to fill in some of those pieces with a cross-platform development solution."
Tom Nicolai from Urban Team talked about the problems of developing multiplayer games - as his company does - with the acceptance that players won't all have the same phone, or even different phones from the same manufacturer.
Jason Citron, CEO of Aurora Feint, was also on the panel. His company runs its OpenFeint service on iPhone alone, so is free of fragmentation worries for now. Kind of.
"Obviously Apple has a few devices and operating system versions, but when you think about fragmentation across different phones, you have issues like screen size, processor speed..."
He also said fragmentation across platforms raises more issues than simply technical ones - there's the comparison between different app stores' qualities too.
"If you compare Android Market to Apple's App Store - we all complain about the App Store, but have you tried buying something on Android Market? The steps they make you go through are scary!"
So how important could Android become, and what does Google need to do to make it a mobile gaming success? Is OpenFeint going to Android?
Citron. "The short answer is maybe. Porting OpenFeint to another platform is not like a development event, it's a business decision. I think it's gonna be a while before the guys at Google really figure out a streamlined experience for customers that makes them want to buy applications. They will figure it out, but I'm not sure then. The decisions they have made to this point makes me think it's not their priority."
He cited the example of the Nexus One, which only ships with 512MB of available memory for applications.
"I don't think they are prioritising the same things that Apple is," he said. "I don't know when it will happen, but when it does happen, OpenFeint will be on there."
Mark Gumpinger of Scoreloop was more positive - the company's social games platform is already on Android. "Everything's not perfect, but it provides a more similar experience to iPhone than the rest of the market. We love both devices."
Citron pointed out that it's the small things that count. "The fact that the wording of the dialogue that pops up when you click purchase evokes a slight fear [on Android]. When you have a thousand of those small things, it all adds up to a different approach."
What about Samsung's new bada platform, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry... Which of these are most interesting for developers, asked Noyons.
Chasey wondered how much market share the various stores will really account for going forward. "These other systems will take market share, although we can all argue about how much they're gonna get. When deciding to support them or not is ultimately down to how commercially successful you think they're going to be."
Closs agreed, citing an unnamed big mobile games publisher as saying that iPhone will still be number one in 2010, but there will be a number two, number three and number four - and that as soon as it becomes apparent who's going to be number two, they'll pile resources into it, and so on.
However, he said smaller developers can't adopt that kind of strategy. Chasey advised developers that "you need a strategy to be able to look at content cross-platform".
Neil Holroyd from Orange, sitting in the audience, slammed the negativity around Android, saying that developers and publishers have got to "get behind it - a lot of customers in Europe are buying Android phones, they see it as a cheaper iPhone".
How about tablets?
Gumpinger suggested there will be differences between how people use tablets and smartphones. "There will for sure be games, and special games for the larger devices. We're prepared for that, and clearly Apple is going to define that device category once again."
Chasey agreed. "Apple by allegedly launching one of these devices will validate the category, and a lot of other companies will follow them. So there's going to be a very interesting opportunity in that area in the coming year or so."
However, he warned that it's too early to tell what kind of games market there will be on these devices.
