Mobile games ?

[Momor]

Greetings,

I've been playing recently with some mobile game development kit (basically J2ME). I've been surprised with the quality of the development tools (which are, moreover, free !).

I was wondering if some of you had already experimented this target platform. I'm quite interested in the ways you can sell the game, and if there's enough audience for such kind of games ...

So far, I've found 2 resellers for mobile software:

- Handago (http://www.handango.com)
- ShareWire (http://www.sharewire.net/)

Both of them seem to send you back 60% of the revenue, but considering the general price of the games (around 5 US $), I'm really wondering it it's worth it ...

So, any experience you would like to share ?

[Sillysoft]

If you search the forums you will find a few threads that talk about mobile possibilities. The general consensus seems to be that you require a publisher to get your game onto the carrier run offerings. Thus it is closer to the retail model then making downloadable PC games.

[tolik]

You'll stand no chance of publishing your game. The situation is pretty much the same as with consoles, GameBoy Advance for example.
Even if you will be able to publish your game through a single distributor, it will stand Number 2048 in their game list.

[vredungmand]

I looked at both a while ago and I unfortunately have the same impression as the other posters.

Sharewire just added a monthly fee of 25 euro to "use" their service. Meaning on top of the fees they get when they sell some of your software, they require an addictional fee of 25 euro pr. month.

I spent quite some time getting two games accepted on Handango and they are still not visible when you browse their catalog. I think Handango wants you to pay for advertisement on their site and various certifications.

Actually I think they are about to require software to be certified for newer mobile phones (priced typically 100-200 euro pr. phone pr. software product). At least that is the case for the Sony Ericsson K700i (the phone which I programmed for), if you want your product to be listed at the Sony Ericsson store (which is a subset of the Handango store).

In short: I don't think you can get any reasonable income from the two resellers as an independent mobile game developer.

[Cogin]

This is one of these thread's from dexterity archive:

http://www.indiegamer.com/archives/t-1031.html

[vredungmand]

And by the way - the payout is not 60%.

For example a premium SMS is 30 dkr. (4 euro) in Denmark, Sharewire pays you 12.5 dkr. incl. VAT. Danish VAT is 25 %, so they pay 10 dkr. excl. VAT.

Of the 30 dkr. VAT is 20%, sharewire and the telcos gets 47%, you get 33%.

And you still have to pay the flat fee of 25 euro pr. month.

http://www.sharewire.net/payouts.php3

[the2bears]

You will need a publisher if you want to have any kind of volume in sales.

But, don't let that discourage you. There are a good number of publishers at the moment all freshly infused with cash. The one advantage I see you having is this: at present there is a lack of quality games available. This will change quickly as people realize the need, but still, if you've got quality titles you'll be able to find a publisher.

That said, it's not so independent is it. However, I do feel the portal market (a la Handango) *should* be successful. It's about marketting. The carriers have a captive audience for marketting - harder to get people to browse to your portal to provision the game.

Good luck, give it a shot. The mobile realm has interesting challenges to work through - if you like challenges:)

Bill

[Cogin]

Here's what I finished some 18 months ago (it was 3 month part time project):

http://www.cogin.com/projects/SkiFlying/index.php

It was very well received by ski jumping fans.
I've tried to market it for 6 months, and signed some 5-6 contract with publishers/distributors. However I received no dime from it. Either these publishers couldn't push it to right channels, or they kept it hidden from me. For one publisher specifically I know it distributed to lot of places on Internet but declined to tell me anything about it.

Even worse is that you don't have contact with end users, so basicly you don't know what's wrong with game. Only feedback I received was from guys who found it on my site, but it can't be realistically sold that way.

[Teq]

Gameloft and mForma are both looking for developers to add to the fold and speaking from experience they do high volumes across a broad range of titles (and are well respected by the industry), of course you'll need a good enough quality game with wide ranging handset support to be considered, but I'm sure you've got that part covered ;)

[tolik]

Doing gameloft-quality game is impossible without 2 years experience.
Trust me.

[Jason Chong]

Gameloft and mForma are both looking for developers to add to the fold and speaking from experience they do high volumes across a broad range of titles (and are well respected by the industry), of course you'll need a good enough quality game with wide ranging handset support to be considered, but I'm sure you've got that part covered ;)


I think that will be a big problem. How many phones can an Indie buy to justify the worthwhileness of the projects ?

Trust me, I've worked in a content development company that also develops mobile games.

You need money to invest a few thousand dollars to buy the phones.
Some of them don't even let you upload midlet through infrared or any other way other than GPRS downloads. Here's some of the major phones I've identified.

1. Nokia
2. Sony Ericsson
3. Motorola
4. Samsung
5. Siemens
6. Alcatel
7. Sagem
8. Philips
9. Panasonic


Then multiply that by 2 (assuming each manufacturer has 2 different versions of the phones, maybe screen resolution size or midp profile versions (1.0 to 2.0)

You'll have to spend money to buy 18 phones, and need to build an api layer that will take advantage of each phones audio layer (if you want midp 1.0 compatibility) by compiling for each phone's sdk (such as nokia UI)

So 18 multiply by average price, say usd 250 x 18 = usd 4500, possibly more.

Furthermore, midp 2.0 phones, have APIs that behave different. With motorola you cannot load more than 1 MIDI files at one time to play them, if you plan to use midi files to double up as sound fx.

In this aspect, for me Sony gives the BEST value as they have the most compliant VM in my opinion, since it's the only phone I've used so far that allows me to load more than 1 midi files and play them back nicely. (not concurrently but you can stop a midi file and play another one that's loaded, with some other phones like nokia/motorola you have to completely delete the class by forcing a nil/system.gc() then load the mid file you wanna play, but this will slow down for sound fx that uses midi files)

Either way, it may or may not be the case, but you've got a lot of research to do, to iron out the quirks/behavior of each phone, as certain sdk functions must be done in certain order for certain phones, and then you'll end up with high score upload problems for phones that do not support a gprs over wap httpconnection access from your j2me midlet.

Then you have the problem of unsigned midlets, you need to spend money to get them signed or else certain mobile carriers will not accept them, or you may not be able to access http network from your j2me midlet.

It is a lot of headache, it's just not worth it for an indie, as you see you'll already be spending a lot of money and time just on these phones and their quirks alone before you see any returns from your games in an already very competitive market that is impossible without going through publishers or content aggregators.

[serg3d]

What if I target high-end symbian phones only ? It seems all nokia system 60 are quite compatible. I was developeding on 6600 but it was running 3650 and ngage without any problems. Of cause symbian phones have low penetration for now, but the situation may improve in a year or two...

[Jason Chong]

I forgot where I read somewhere, there're now Series 65 phones and Series 45 phones with new resolutions.

So you see my point ? More money need to be spent again to test on these phones. WIth nokia alone you need to buy 5 types of phones, S30, S40, S60, S45 and S65 now.

The phone manufacturers just can't seem to stick to a fixed display resolution standard, they want to be different and FORCES exclusivity support from developers coz they don't want to play fair.

The indie game developer will have to have a lot of cash to spare to buy these phones to ensure their games can cover a lot of base, or else as someone mentioned, publishers will not look at you, and you can't sell it yourself easily with content aggregators and network operators between you and your customer. I see more cons than pros and I don't really believe the mobile gaming hype of a billions dollar industry anyway.

I could be wrong, but I have no money to ensure my j2me game will attract any publisher if they require that my games run on the phones listed above, worst still I am in a country where I lose out in exchange rate for purchasing power so those phones I have to buy are going to really eat into 1 to 2 years of my cost of living.

The root of the problem now seems to be Cell/Network operators who're being smug and barricaded the distribution, they're the kings now and get to dictate how much they want to take from the share of the games.

[Momor]

Many thanks for all this valuable information ! I agree it can be a pain to design games which will run on the most possible range of devices, and in any case I'm mostly interested in MIDP 2.0 only.

So I think I'll keep mobile development as a hobby for now. Who knows, I might be able to get something "sexy" from those cells !!!

[Vectrex]

what about dev emulators?

[Jason Chong]

what about dev emulators?

Emulators are crap I tell ya, they don't always behave the same way you see on the real device especially if you need to use httpconnection class. Behaviour varies across different network operators.

I've received more data than expected when I expect a simple string
returned from the server side scripts. Some network operator will return
extra info such as XML related template/data before actually returning
the string you outputted from your asp/php script.

You have to take care to know the start-stop of your actual text. Took
some time to found out you need to do this for certain operators.

Then one of the network operators here has problems that causes your
j2me midlet to crash if you use httpconnection class with certain phone models, such as Motorola V300 and higher series. That's the weirdest
thing, when I switch sim cards to different network operator/provider the
problem went away. Otherwise you always get a javaIOException error no matter what you do that works on other network/phones.

You'll never be able to track these problems using just an emulator since
the internet emulation is too 'perfect' and 'ideal'. Your connection attempt
from the emulator will not go through the network operator's machines/proxies
so you will not be able to discover all the quirks and issues that may be
related to them for a particular phone model.

These cell network operators may fine-tune the way they deliver contents to
certain models of the phones when you try to use httpConnection so you get 'funny' results sometimes because they try to be too smart. Tried to inform them that they're screwing up results for certain phones where the problem does not exist in other network/cell providers, but they can't be bothered to reply you, they're too arrogant for their own good.

And if you don't call serviceRepaints() after repaint(), on certain phone models it will cause the fps to lag, but on other phones you won't see a lag, and calling that function on Sony Ericsson models is not a good idea since it may cause it to slow down in fps, and all these problems are not visible in the emulator.

The emulator does not necessarily emulate the phone's actual bugs which you need to avoid. This so especially true if you need to handle incoming calls gracefully. Your game must be able to repaint/redraw/recover nicely after a pause due to incoming calls, which is NOT at all emulated !!!! The behaviour is almost certain to be different with so many different phones!

Emulators DON'T DO incoming calls or any other INTERRUPTIONS. And some of the phone manufacturers may not actually provide an emulator at all.

[the2bears]

what about dev emulators?

Jason is right. Emulators are more accurately (eloquently?) called "approximators" or even "aboutimators" around here.

As far as all the porting goes, it's a tough one if the carrier requires all those skus. Fact is, most people only buy games for a few months after getting a new phone (all about excitement, trying something out etc.) so supporting older phones arguable makes little sense going forward. But, sheer numbers too.

Bill

[MirekCz]

Yeah, emulators are crap:)

I have heard way too many "I wrote it, worked perfect on emulator, compiled it for device and BUM... it crashes" stories :)
I do 100% development on cellphones.. maybe not the fastest way as it takes some time to copy/install data over each time you recompile project, but you find all compatibility/other problems immediatelly and don't get surprised by some emulator/cellphone compatibility problems at the end.

Anyway regarding mobile games dev (or rather overall symbian dev) I have attended today Nokia's seminar regarding symbian programming (it was actually java/symbian seminar, but I have attended the symbian part) and I must say that I'm highly pleased with it.
i did learn a lot about future of nokia phones, new api developments, marketting/sales possibilities and I did get a chance to talk with few of the nokia top-peoples which work on platform development etc.
It was little game-oriented, althrought many topics could be used for games (topics include communication, 3d graphics, choosing between java/native symbian programs etc.). All materials presented on this seminar should be available from forum.nokia.com site really soon now (or maybe they are already available, I haven't checked yet).

Anyway, If you would really consider doing some cellphone development I highly encourage you to visit Nokia seminar near you if possible. Great way to learn a lot of new stuff, get some motivation and contacts to other developers/nokia staff.

[serg3d]

Yeah, emulators are crap:)
I have heard way too many "I wrote it, worked perfect on emulator, compiled it for device and BUM... it crashes" stories :)
I do 100% development on cellphones..
What IDE are you using ? CodeWarrior ? Do you have any problem with integrated on-device debugger ? (sorry to be off-topic :) that is just my sore spot, i still not using on-device debugging and weghting short-term benefits , to leran it or not...(as always the time is main limitiung factor) )

[MirekCz]

I do no debugging, only log files.

As far sa I know there are some problems with codewarrior on-device debugger (especially with newest sdk or so.. and you need the 1500$ pro version)

I have heard yesterday that borland c== mobileX edition (or what's the name) is given out free and it has got on-device debugging.. so I might give it a try sometime soon... problem is borland functions well with 512mb and i have got "only" 256mb.

If you can and would test it that would be nice... I don't think I will buy 256mb of mem just to see if it works/works fast enought to be useable :)

[Escotia]

For mobile types looking for some extra non-exclusive distribution...

One of our clients has asked us to source mobile games for sale at POS in retail stores here in the UK. There's a trial due to take place in December/January, with it going *much* larger scale after if it all goes to plan.

We're in need of some more games to try and balance the game types a bit. So if you've got a sport game or space invaders type game then PM me or email us at: indiemobile@bigfizz.com

There is also a second distribution opportunity through more traditional channels. All game types wanted. Get in touch if you're interested.

[someone]

What about PalmOS or PocketPC game development? Any experiences?