10/29/06, 11:35 - News Flash!
As you may of guessed, Mobilize! is on hiatus for the time being. I'm currently attending the University of Chicago in an attempt to earn an MA in International Relations before next June. It's even crazier than it sounds, I assure you.
Nevertheless, I am still accepting mobile games consulting assignments on the side, so if you have some games you need reviewed, please do get in touch.
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8/17/06, 20:49 - Weekly Spotlight
When it comes to consuming mobile phone services, we Americans like to keep things as simple as possible. Often enough, the choice comes down to a quick judgment call while standing on a street corner. Will it be the family plan proffered by Verizon’s bespectacled geek, or has Catherine Zeta-Jones has seduced the prospective customer into T-Mobile’s camp? Does Cingular’s orange mannikin trump Sprint Nextel’s yellow swoop?
A decision is made, the subscriber-to-be enters one of the Big Three Plus One’s (T-Mobile is somewhat smaller than the others) convenient retail outlets, a contract of some kind is consummated, and the new convert leaves with whichever phone costs the least--or a Motorola RAZR, if he or she is of a younger persuasion.
Horses For Courses
The scenario outlined above has been streamlined for rhetorical purposes, but it’s representative of a majority of the simple transactions that have formed the commercial backbone of the US wireless industry for the past decade. The market provides consumers with several viable choices, yes--but in the consumer’s view, it hardly matters which carrier they go with, because they are functionally identical. A phone is a phone, voice is voice, and SMS is SMS, so the decision to bypass one store for another usually comes down to two factors: clever marketing schemes and the lowest of all common denominators, price.
Consequently, choosing a carrier these days is kind of like deciding what color your new business cards should be: Bone, Eggshell, French Vanilla, or Classic White? There are differences, but they are subtle enough not to affect most consumers’ buying decisions. Mobile games publishers would love to think that mobile content is becoming an important differentiating factor, but most aren’t capable of lying to themselves that effectively.
By way of comparison, the new crop of Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs), such as Amp’d Mobile, Helio, Disney Mobile, and ESPN Mobile, want to splash bright colors all over the Big Three Plus One’s nice, predictable, blank canvas, after buying network time from the big guys for their creations--and they’re going to use the whole box of crayons. Amp’d Mobile has cut live-broadcast deals with various extreme sporting events to attract male youths; Helio’s riding the Generation Z zeitgeist with MySpace; and Disney and ESPN’s services have features galore aimed squarely at the kiddie and sports freak demographics, respectively.
Mobile Gaming - A Selling Point?
Mobile gaming is definitely a go-to crayon in the MVNO stash, especially for Amp’d Mobile and Helio, which seem to be competing for the same pool of young, tech-savvy, video gaming customers. Industry wags have watched the two go head-to-head over the last year trying to outrace one another on the games front. The dueling services have stacked up many innovative features, including gifting and begging functionality, programs where you can win “loyalty points” by playing mobile games, and onboard professional reviews.
Amp’d, Helio, and the rest of the MVNO gang are clearly taking great pains to turn mobile content from a vestigial afterthought into the main attraction; indeed, the features named above are exactly the kinds of consumer-satisfying, business-building infrastructure that every mobile games publisher has been howling about for years. So, you’d think that the publishers would be falling all over themselves to get prime billing on the new services, right?
Wrong. I remember speaking to one prominent developer back in 2005 about the exciting business prospects offered by the MVNOs, whose hype machines were just starting to get revved up around that time. He agreed that the new content-centric attitudes and technologies embodied by MVNOs like Helio (then known only as SK-Earthlink) and Amp’d were pretty cool, but he shook his head when I asked him whether he was going to be first in line to put his games on the new services. “These guys are ambitious, and they have some great ideas,” he explained, “but guess how many subscribers they have right now? Zippo. It costs a lot of money to port my games onto their handsets, and that’s money I should be using to make new games for carriers that actually have customers.”
Value Propositions?
He made a great point that many in the mobile content industry still agree with: the content-centric MVNO has a lot of potential, but that’s all it is until they actually have enough customers to register on the radar screen. Verizon, Cingular, and Sprint Nextel are kind of boring, and they are certainly slow to liberalize their content models...but it’s awfully tough to argue with 100 million subscribers. Those are the kinds of numbers that turn marketing hype into cold, hard cash, and MVNOs don’t have them. In fact, a lot of prominent analysts are loudly doubting whether Amp’d, Helio, and the rest will ever be able to move the subscriber needle off of zero. Merrill Lynch has even called for Disney to kill off ESPN Mobile before things get worse for investors.
This is premature. It’s hard to deny that the baby MVNOs have fallen on their faces out of the gate, but they still have plenty of cash to keep expanding in the medium term. Helio, for instance, is backed by the nearly bottomless pockets of SK Telecom, and Amp’d has rung up plenty of investment from Universal Music Group and various venture capital firms. Disney’s MVNOs, obviously, aren’t going anywhere until Disney decides to pull the plug, and that doesn’t seem to be a risk at the moment.
So, the content-centric MVNOs will have a chance to set things right. Where do they start? Other analysts have suggested that these fledgling carriers need to improve their handset options, as well as focus on the prepaid subscriber plans that other businesses like Virgin Mobile have marketed successfully to the youth demographic. These strategies are certainly two important pieces of the puzzle, but I think the MVNOs would be better served starting from the bottom of the commerce pyramid, just like the Big Three Plus One has.
Getting Things Right
As outlined previously, the two keys to the mobile services game are still retail presence and pricing, and the MVNOs have really dropped the ball on both counts. If Helio and Amp’d thought they could get away with selling phones and plans on the Internet, they have been proven wrong beyond a shadow of a doubt. Americans may have grown comfortable with customizing and buying personal computers online, but the same cannot be said for phones. They want to enter a store, have a salesperson answer their questions, and pick up a box; that way, if something goes wrong or they don’t get what they want, they’ll feel like they have some human-based chance for recompense. The fact that consumers are required to sign long contracts enforced by fines only amplifies this feeling.
Secondly, the MVNOs have not offered value propositions that can compete with the Big Three Plus One’s economies of scale. For instance, neither Helio nor Amp’d Mobile offers free phones of any kind, and the voice plans are much pricier than the mainstream carriers on a per-minute basis. Yes, the phones offered are really cool, and they have all kinds of multimedia capabilities and services that the big operators lack--but a lot of consumers will be skeptical, either because they don’t understand what the multimedia services can do for them, or because they don’t think they’ll work well enough to pay loads extra for.
The basic pricing comparison is very important, and unless the MVNOs educate potential buyers effectively, they will lose it every time. A skilled retail sales force (preferably built of young, attractive hipsters) can explain why an MVNO’s service is so much more expensive by demonstrating its unique capabilities to the consumer; the new carriers should have recognized early on that “boots on the ground” are an absolute necessity for their cause.
Correct Course Charted?
Happily, it seems as though the MVNOs have started to make the necessary in-course corrections. Amp’d recently scored a retail deal to sell phones at Best Buy’s popular electronics stores, and Helio is opening up its own clutch of retail outlets designed by the same guys that do Apple’s amazing stores.
These are excellent first steps on the road to expansion and profitability. It’s far too early to throw in the towel on the MVNOs--especially since their ideas and enthusiasm are helping to push the larger carriers towards opening up their content strategies. Even if the MVNOs never exit the flyweight class, that second-order effect alone may be enough to justify their existence.
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8/4/06, 13:57 - Weekly Spotlight
If you’ve been reading this column for the last several months, it may seem as though I have taken my old profession as a mobile games ‘criticalist’ (has anyone coined a better term for the position of critic/journalist?) several steps further in a fit of pique, and morphed into one of the medium’s more committed skeptics. Please allow me set the record straight: I like mobile games, as well as most of the people who make them, and I believe wholeheartedly in mobile gaming’s future.
I know that these articles have devoted considerable verbiage to pointing out the medium’s many serious issues. Consider it tough love. In my opinion, two of the most glaring problems are also very straightforward: complacency on the part of the industry, and simple ignorance on the part of everyone else. A tonic for both is a stiff dose of independent journalism, which is why I am coming to appreciate sites like Quickly Bored, bombastic commentary and all.
But still, giving credit where it is due is just as important as doling out criticism--and for every regressive business practice and worthless piece of shovelware the mobile games industry has produced, there has been a corresponding bright spot.
Things Can Only Get Better!
A great example of a real industry triumph has been the publishing sector’s embrace of the quality ideal in product design. Many who observe mobile gaming in a professional capacity agree that overall quality has improved greatly over the past year. At first glance, this development would seem to be perfectly natural, given the level of improvement in the industry’s technological and business positions. Thank you, Mr. McObvious! But the story goes deeper than that.
In fact, the change I’m talking about is purely volitional, and it comes as a result of several years of experimentation on the costs and benefits of mobile game production. Until recently, the jury was out on whether making the highest quality mobile games would also make a company the most successful mobile games publisher.
In the bad old days, it wasn’t easy to assemble enough talent to make a run at producing a quality game. Even if you had the right people, there was no guarantee they’d be able to find a way to turn your amazing concept document into a product.
Making Do Doesn't Cut It
Making the games everyone would have wanted was expensive and risky, so we went to war with the games we had, so to speak. Instead of all those products that were supposed to ‘unlock the unique potential of the mobile platform,’ consumers got three straight years of games that come free with Windows, shoddy knockoffs, branded garbage, and retro ports that should have stayed in 1982.
Worse, a lot of these games were shipped with show-stopping bugs and other gaping design holes. One game I reviewed crashed every time you performed a command necessary to win a match. It’s one thing for an industry to produce an endless stream of games that aren’t any fun; if they’re also broken, that’s insult to injury.
And yet, even as we handed out our equally endless supply of mediocre to middling scores, we got the sense that there was a greater design lurking behind the rush for short-term gains. Although they were making derivative products, some companies were clearly trying harder than others, and if you looked carefully, you could see holes in certain games where features and levels had been removed to meet a budget or a deadline.
I remember many cases where the capability to make a great game had clearly been present, as had the desire and the plan...but the execution wasn’t quite right. Something was missing, and that something was expertise.
Getting Things Up To Scratch
When reviewers refer to the elusive quality of ‘polish,’ here’s what they actually mean: five percent more effort, applied in exactly the right spots. Needless to say, figuring out where those spots are is much, much more difficult than simply spending more money. Indeed, the process is largely experimental, especially when publishers are entering a brand-new medium like mobile phones. In retrospect, many of the steps on the path to the new threshold of quality seem like no-brainers, but they actually weren’t obvious at all at the time.
For instance, take the inclusion of a sound on/off switch at the beginning of a mobile game. It makes sense that someone playing a mobile game in public might want to silence the game before it can produce any embarrassing noises, right? Not to designers who had worked on console games for their entire careers. In fact, I didn’t see a game with this simple feature until late 2004, and it took a full year after that to become commonplace.
How about guided, step-by-step tutorials designed with non-gamers in mind, or one-handed controls, or simplified, high-contrast graphics, or gameplay symbols that are readily identifiable on tiny phone screens? There are a million of these seemingly trivial design tweaks (here’s an excellent preliminary list, compiled by UK reviews site Pocket Gamer), and more are being discovered and tested out every day. In aggregate, they are hugely significant.
Best Practices - Much Better
It’s now clear that the industry has evolved at least a basic set of conventions and ‘best practices’ for making mobile games. Publishers finally have a good idea of which features work well and which ones don’t, so they don’t have to spend lots of resources reinventing the wheel; they can simply make a decent mobile game right out of the gate by copying their neighbors.
However, now that quality is the watchword, nobody wants to make games that are merely passable--now that they know where and how to direct their energies, practically every publisher is falling over the others to be first in line. They are spending money like crazy to improve their review scores, compete for awards, and hire the best design talent. It’s all gravy for the consumer.
Conclusion
The enforcement mechanism for the new regime, as always, is distribution. The carriers have gotten in on the act, to their credit, and will now summarily reject any game that doesn’t meet their swiftly rising minimum standards. I saw this happen a few times at MGC’s “LivePitch” event a month ago, where developers hawked their wares in front of a carrier panel, and believe me, it wasn’t pretty.
At the same time, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Now that the industry has become obsessed with raising the quality of its games, the next step will be for it to apply that same fire to thinking up entirely new game ideas. All the polish in the world can’t make an old design into a novel product.
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7/28/06, 15:26 - Weekly Spotlight
This week, I’d like to put on my engineering cap and apply a reductionist approach to mobile gaming. The way I see it, the supply side of the industry can be broken down into three major components--logistics, entertainment, and medium.
“Logistics” covers stuff like game discovery, downloading, and billing; it’s a catchall category for the commercial activities that connect seller to buyer. “Entertainment” simply refers to the game itself. “Medium” is all about the device that allows the consumer to first navigate mobile gaming’s logistics and then enjoy his or her entertainment...in theory, at least.
These three components are mutually necessary. For example, there’s no reason for a publisher to develop games if customers can’t find them easily and buy them reliably. At the same time, if a game is poorly realized and fails to entertain, it’s not going to matter what kind of device the consumer’s using to play it, or even how much it cost in the first place. However, the three pillars aren’t necessarily equally important to the overall success of the enterprise.
Pet Theories, No Right Answers?
In fact, everyone who’s been in the industry for a while has their own pet theory about which leg of the triangle has the biggest net effect on the collective’s future. Unsurprisingly, each particular segment of the industry tends to assign the lion’s share of responsibility to someone else.
Publishers tend to believe that logistics are paramount, and wonder loudly why the carriers aren’t spending more on marketing. Carriers, meanwhile, argue that publishers should work on the entertainment factor, because it’s awfully difficult to sell boring, low-quality games. Handset makers worry about handsets playing second fiddle to carrier networks promotionally, while also jousting with publishers over consumer demand for fancy gaming capabilities in phones. Analysts roll their eyes at the other groups and try to sell them answers based on proprietary data sets.
This thorny chicken-and-egg problem is driven by the self interest of all of these groups. They exist in symbiosis while competing for shares in the same mobile entertainment pie. The balance of power has been static for the last several years, because the technological premises that are foundational to the model haven’t changed much.
The carriers are on top, because they control the download deck, which is the only point of sale that matters; publishers know this, so they sell to the carriers, not the consumers; and handset makers, sensing disinterest from carriers and consumers alike, optimize their devices for low-effort, high-margin forms of mobile entertainment (like ringtones).
Inside The Iron Triangle
This iron triangle model has been functional since 2002, and would probably be sustainable into perpetuity with occasional adjustments. It inhibits growth and innovation, but it’s also reasonably profitable and very low risk.
Everyone in the industry has grown pretty comfortable with this way of doing business, and they can afford to be--after all, the market is still growing organically, and the process of getting mobile games onto consumer phones has steadily become more efficient, thanks to procedural improvements between publishers and carriers. In the absence of real alternatives, the only thing capable of breaking the pattern would be one of the aforementioned technological watersheds...and that hasn’t happened yet.
Or has it? Ever since I purchased my Motorola Q a few weeks ago, I’ve started to think that an unstoppable, fundamental change may have been initiated under everyone’s noses. Now, I’m not a Q fanatic by any stretch; I would probably rate the device a solid 7 out of 10. It’s got plenty of issues, including poor battery life, a janky operating system, and mediocre processor performance, to name a few.
The A Is Q!
But I still bought one! I plopped down $200 at my local Verizon Wireless outlet--along with $80 a month for the all-you-can-eat data plan--because I wanted to be able to surf the web remotely, swap IMs with friends, and have constant access to my various e-mail accounts. The charges I’m paying seem trivial next to the utility I get out of the Q, since I currently satisfy about 80% of my communications needs over the internet (and I’d like to make it 100%, to be honest). That is hardly an unusual percentage figure for Americans in their teens to mid-20s, who are gravitating to TXT, IM and e-mail in large numbers. Voice is for moms, dads, and other assorted elders.
What do I get along with being able to browse the internet whenever and wherever I want? I get a fantastic landscape screen, great stereo speakers, a QWERTY keyboard, and a pretty slick aesthetic that’s already sold tens of millions in the guise of the Moto RAZR. All of this makes the Motorola Q America’s first true consumer smart phone; Blackberries are standard-issue for corporate wage slaves, Treos are for early adopters and gadget freaks with lots of cash, and Symbian phones are for wealthy Europeans, but the Motorola Q carries none of these associations.
It’s hip, it’s affordable, it’s being advertised heavier than any other phone in history, and it works...well enough. It’s going to be a hit of monumental proportions, especially once Verizon subsidizes the price down even further and makes unlimited data a little cheaper, probably in time for Christmas 2006.
Q And Mobile Gaming
The Q’s propagation (as well as the spread of competing devices that Motorola’s competitors will inevitably release) will have profound effects on the mobile gaming market. All of a sudden, the consumer has a mobile web browser that actually works, instead of a crippled WAP portal, meaning that he or she can easily browse on over to a game publisher’s site, look at preview graphics, and buy games from the source. The Motorola Q doesn’t just let consumers wander around off-deck, it doesn’t have a deck at all--Get It Now is missing in action! Somebody had better step into the breach and take advantage of this opportunity quickly.
In addition, the Q’s audiovisual, keyboard, network and storage capabilities open up all kinds of new horizons for game designers, who might now be able to make the kinds of games they’ve been dreaming about for years. The Q is a mobile PC, and it’s bound to push all three pillars of the mobile gaming market towards ground that PC gaming has already covered. Ultimately, this means full-fledged internet retailing, free competition, networked gaming, downloadable content, and happier, more interested customers.
Conclusion
I’m not the first analyst to have this idea--M:Metrics released a similarly upbeat assessment on the Q a few weeks ago--but my personal experience with the Q has really driven the point home: this is the magical device/price point combination that mobile entertainment has questing after. Hopefully, publishers will agree, and begin to invest their resources accordingly.
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7/21/06, 14:40 - Weekly Spotlight
Last week, I had the pleasure of attending The Game Initiative’s Mobile Game Conference in downtown Bellevue, Washington. In truth, I hadn’t planned on taking the trip this year--until conference co-organizer Matthew Bellows, a good friend of mine (and my erstwhile boss from WGamer.com and GameSpot Mobile), needed a substitute moderator for a few panels, stat. I’m glad I made it, because I nearly missed a rare chance to watch mobile gaming’s future in action.
Trip To The Moon
But first things first--we all got some pretty good face time with mobile gaming’s present, too. In one keynote, Digital Chocolate’s Trip Hawkins, a truly extraordinary evangelist in front of live audiences, explained how his company is positioned to take advantage of the mobile phone’s quickening evolution into a “social computer.”
Trip’s delivered this message many times over the past few years, and I don’t think he’s any less correct now than he has been in the past. Recently, DChoc’s put some juice into the idea by releasing products like MLSN Sports Picks and the upcoming AvaFlirting, which produce fun by mediating intermittent, asynchronous contact between networks of users. Still, however conceptually interesting these games may be, DChoc’s bread and butter flows from fairly standard puzzle and card games at the moment.
Get Yourself Connected
Two of the other keynotes, delivered by Square Enix’s Daishiro Okada and Microsoft Casual Games Group’s Chris Early, also focused on some of the possibilities of connected mobile gaming, albeit from very different angles. Okada mentioned Square Enix’s plans to migrate Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII, a online mobile multiplayer adventure that’s been wildly successful in Japan, to the American market later this year.
Essentially, Square Enix is going to use Final Fantasy--which has become one of the world’s most powerful entertainment brands--to wow the carriers and crowbar open the American market. Then, the company will give the people what they want: an explanation of where Sephiroth really came from, wrapped up in a nice little mobile package with some MMORPG elements. Mobile gaming is still alien territory to many American console gamers, but Square Enix is betting that they can recreate an experience that its fans in the States already understand and enjoy.
Later, Early recapped Microsoft’s blueprint for its Live Anywhere service, which will ultimately extend XBox Live’s gaming network to encompass players on Windows Vista and mobile handsets. The gamer’s persona will dwell on Live Anywhere’s network servers, enabling players to polish their gaming medals and talk trash from a range of connected terminals.
When Is Change?
In the assessment of many mobile insiders--including those from the companies listed above--it will take at least a year, if not longer, before any of these interpretations of connected mobile gaming produce results in North America. That’s why everyone talks about these ideas in the future tense, even though the companies that are promulgating them are in the spotlight right now. The mobile gaming medium is lousy with technological, commercial, business, and marketing limitations, and it’s going to take time for even superpowers like Microsoft to tear the barriers down.
However, if you think about it, none of these plans have anything to do with the future, except in the strictest temporal sense of the word. They’re actually about the past, because they rely on evolving old ideas to match new mobile technologies. For instance, DChoc elected to produce MLSN Sports Picks after fantasy sports leagues and sports betting blew up. Square Enix certainly knows that Final Fantasy games are basically a sure thing, no matter what medium they show up on, and Microsoft already has tens of millions of XBox Live subscribers to bank on.
A Refreshing Difference!
That’s why MCG’s fourth and final keynote beat the other three handily and was the highlight of the conference, in my opinion. My buddy Matthew has been to dozens of these conferences, which can usually be sketched as follows: the same people delivering the same pitches to the same audience about six times a year. So, when he finally got an opportunity to plan his own, he wanted to make sure that one of the big presentations was given by someone with serious prophetic qualities--a pure thinker, unencumbered by corporate responsibilities...or the depressing weight of reality in today’s mobile games space.
Enter Justin Hall, stage left. For those that don’t know him, Hall is best described an all-purpose new media visionary. He is generally credited with starting the blogging phenomenon all the way back in 1994, when he was still in college. Since then, he’s written boatloads of content for his own site, links.net, as well as Wired, Rolling Stone, Salon, and (drumroll, please) Wireless Gaming Review.
I vividly remember my first encounter with Hall in 2004, when he served as a judge for WGR’s First Annual Wireless Gaming Awards (aka ‘The Mobies,’ now administered by GameSpot). He ate through my stock of entrants in a highly mechanized fashion, never failing to exclaim, “This game (bleepin’) sucks!” at the end of each five-minute session. He was disappointed when I told him that someone had to win; even though I didn’t say anything at the time, I kind of was, too.
Hall isn’t a mobile games dude--his expertise lies at the nexus of entertainment and communications. Mobile’s just going to be the vector for his grand vision, which he presented at his MGC keynote. His term for the idea is “passively multiplayer gaming,” and it basically involves making a persistent MMORPG out of the mundane events of your life.
Lesko Crazy!
Hall’s argument was a little difficult to follow at his presentation, because he’s what some people like to call an ‘animated speaker’ (think one part Matthew Lesko, the Question Mark Guy, two parts Buckminster Fuller)--but, upon reflection, it makes a lot of sense. According to Hall, we already spend a healthy chunk of time in contact with our friends and contacts over electronic media: there’s e-mail, instant messaging, blogging, World of Warcraft, and so on. Location-based mobile technology can already tell you where you are.
Now, companies like Finland-based Jaiku are melding the two together, so it’s possible to know where everyone in your social network is at any given time. Throw in some AI, and pretty soon your phone will be taking location-based contextual guesses at their activities--for example, if someone stays in the vicinity of a movie theater for two hours, the system will be pretty sure that they’re watching a movie.
The other piece of Hall’s puzzle is user permission. If you join a passively multiplayer gaming group, you’ll presumably be willing to yield some of your privacy and tell your buddies what you’re up to at any given time, just as we sometimes do in an instant messenger client. After a while, the system will learn your patterns of everyday behavior and become more adept at guessing your activities. So, if you were to tell the system that you’re a smoker, it’ll start to guess that you’re smoking a cigarette when you take a brief trip outside.
NPC Friend Delights
At that point, turning your life into one of Hall’s passively multiplayer games is simply a matter of adding game logic. All of your friends will turn into NPC allies, ready to come to your aid in an imaginary game world that parallels your own. Hall’s example at MGC was a simple one--defusing a loose nuke would require timely responses from friends with a certain number of ‘skill points’ in physics--but the possibilities are actually even more endless than they are in real life. Your ‘character’ could gain levels and skill points by checking e-mail, going to saxophone lessons, or writing a column for Gamasutra. Spam e-mails could be turned into enemy fire. Heck, the aforementioned cigarette break could help your friend poison a horde of aliens with toxic chemicals, if you wanted it to!
Is Hall’s seemingly miraculous gaming system feasible? Absolutely not today, and probably not in 2007, either. Hall has no bottom line to meet (he’s currently a grad student at USC), so he has the luxury of thinking three to five years ahead...and that’s exactly the kind of visionary quality that mobile gaming so desperately needs. Mobile is clearly on the cutting edge as a medium, and yet mobile gaming’s runaway successes are Jamdat Bowling, Tetris, and Pac-Man. In point of fact, it is by far the least progressive sector of the entire games industry.
Conclusion
On the other hand, passively multiplayer gaming doesn’t sound like a game at all, and that’s the point. Hall intuitively realizes that mobile gaming has no chance whatsoever to meet or exceed our expectations of what constitutes a game; to realize its potential, it must transcend those expectations entirely and deliver something we’ve never seen or thought of before.
Hall hasn’t sold any games yet, or made any money. He doesn’t have a company or a board of directors. That’s why he was able to steal the show at MGC--lots of companies are working piecemeal to reach the all-important point of convergence between gaming, networking, and mobility, while Hall has taken the holistic approach to assemble a complete picture of the future.
Some will call passively multiplayer gaming on mobile an absurd leap of faith. I ask, where do I jump?
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