April 4th, 2007 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: Web Apps | 5 Comments »
This blog is all about mobile gaming, you all know that. Untill now however, we mostly discussed J2me, Symbian and other gaming technologies that require the classic download method. There is much more however. In this editorial by HandyGames, they explain the possibilities and opportunities that lay in WAP based games.
In 2000, the European mobile games market didn’t really exist. Ok, there were some bad quality black and white games, which came pre-installed on handsets, e.g. Snake, and the first mobile internet browsers were coming up.
Users were used to write SMS and for them WAP was a more advanced technology. Services were provided on a server where each user connected to and requested pages from this server. These WAP pages were created separately for each user session and sent to the mobile phone browser. We were stuck with a standard Client-Server environment that only had very basic features. Navigation was dominated by links and graphics had no animation at all.
Analysts predicted a strong growth of WAP gaming and many companies on the mobile games market calculated their numbers based on a positive tendency which was also pushed by the success of the Internet.
But what hindered the fast success was the fact, that browsers were hard to configure, hard to control and the graphics were hard to recognize. WAP gaming was not sexy at all, especially because of the low traffic rates which caused slow game play. So the usage and the revenues were low, too.
Nevertheless, some bigger companies like I-Play (in these times named DigitalBridges), In-Fusio and Gameloft (formerly known as Ludiwap and Ludigames) started to produce and publish their first line-up of WAP games and placed them at the operator portals
Interesting article on WAP gaming… I did look at WAP back in 2001 briefly, but as you say it would be probably a lot trickier now to turn into revenue for relative newcomers to this side of the mobile games industry (I include myself in that statement), though that does’nt I would’nt look at it further perhaps now you’ve brought the subject up 🙂
Personally I’ve got an eyeball at least on Blackberry devices next regards expanding mobile development further but your post is insteresting as I said 🙂
“Personally I’ve got an eyeball at least on Blackberry devices next regards expanding mobile development further”
BlackBerries support both WAP and MIDlets, so there’s nothing stopping you :).
“The technology is evolving
If there is a chance that wap-gaming will survive the next years, with mmogames coming on our mobiles, it is the development of browsergames, like those you can already find on the web. first of all they must be free to play, maybe ad-financed, or free of trafficbills. i would pay 5
Areed. We certainly view WAP as critical, and we do continue to develop games for it, and have even gotten buy-in from advertisers.