May 23rd, 2005 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Trends | 1 Comment »
hile next-generation consoles and cutting-edge graphics dominate the floor at E3, if you look around the edges, away from the crowds, you’ll find a number of companies hoping that the next big platform will be one that you may already have in your pocket: the mobile phone.
Cell phones are largely unstandardized and often more than a decade behind the times in rendering power. Nevertheless, there are plenty of game producers banking on them. More …
Its interesting that Wired is finally taking notice of this lucrative market however they fail to cover the more difficult aspects of the market. The main problem for small developrs comes in with the concept of porting. As more and more handsets are released each with competing technologies, developers are burdened with the difficulties of ensuring that their games work on a variety of platforms in multiple languages. In the past we have been keeping our solutions inhouse, having a team dedicated to porting each version to work with the post popular handsets. The cost however of this often has exceeded the actual cost of developing the game itself. Just for a figure it often costs 2000-3000 US Dollars for each port. Its been cuting into my cost structure tremendously. However last week while I was in Los Angeles for E3 I also attended the Next Gen conference where individuals from a variety of mobile services presented panels. One panel of particular interest was hosted by Sameer Bhatia’s of Octane Technologies who analyzed and presented solutions to this mobile gaming porting dilemma. He emphasized working with specialized units that work with offshore teams to develop ports quickly, cheaply and of quality. Our firm is currently in negotation to contract out some work, and if successful, we might have found out how to finally leverage ourselves in this competitive yet lucrative mobile gaming business, bringing our quality games to a widest variety of handsets and users at a low cost.