Second International Convention on Mobile Games

by Niall Fraser (director, Covert Operations Ltd.)

The mobile games market has been evolving rapidly since its birth and at the Second International Convention on Mobile Games held recently in Dublin (December 2001), representatives from all sectors of the industry gathered to discuss the recent changes and the path for the future.

As the market leaves its infancy, companies who were there from the start have gained a better feel for it and the most profitable areas are being identified. The business and profit models for all sides are becoming clearer and more mainstream companies are starting to get involved. Names like Kuju, Warthog and even Sony were in attendance at the convention and many more are now very active in the market. As with the rest of the games industry, branded content is seen as the way to attract players to mobile games with the hope that they will go on to explore more of what is available.

Mentioned throughout the convention were the Mobile Entertainment Forum, who are involved in all aspects of mobile games and the Mobile Game Interoperability Forum who concentrate on the technical side such as the call for open standards.

Current games are mainly SMS or WAP based, SMS games having the advantage that they can be played on practically any phone, but with the release of Java enabled phones comes a new generation of games which can be played without constantly connecting. New handsets and new technologies are being released all the time enabling a wide variety of gaming styles. More traditional games will be downloaded and played much as on a Game Boy whilst other games already take advantage of the phones connectivity to allow location based games such as Telia Mobile's impressive (and popular) location based combat game, BotFighters.

As the new hardware is developed, new software is emerging to take advantage of it. Max Tragger from packetvideo demonstrated the capabilities of wireless multimedia and Openwave proudly showed their Services OS which provides a familiar, user friendly interface.

There are currently a large number of platforms available for games and one of the most prominent at the convention was Unity from Digital Bridges. During the initial developer day which they hosted, there was a lot of information on Unity and on general development including a very good talk by Nick Goodall on the pitfalls and best practices for J2ME development. Other prominent platforms included Mserver from Mforma with Christophe Watkins giving an excellent talk on creating open and flexible platforms, and Cash-U's Pecan.

Also during developer day, IOMO's MD, John Chasey, was at hand to give an impressive demonstration of their 3D golf game, showing what you can really do with WAP.

During the main two days of the convention there was much talk of the type of people who play mobile games as well when, where, why and for how long. A picture was formed of a market which crosses a broad spectrum of the population, with games mainly being played during spare moments such as on the train or in the car, though hopefully not whilst driving! Many are not part of the general gamer market and so a different style of game is required. Others are, and enjoy the unique gaming opportunities that mobile games provide.

Overall a market was shown which has come of age but hasn’t stopped growing by a long shot. Think how many people you know with a mobile phone, this is the size of the mobile games markets potential and as the operators give us faster connections and manufacturers give us handsets with faster processors, bigger screens with colour, cameras and who knows what else the games possible can only be imagined...

Here are some photos taken during the event:

IOMOs John Chasey and Digital Bridges' Chris Wright infront of the DB stand.