Games for cellphones

[Anlino]

Read an article in a Swedish gamingmagazine yesterday, about the lack of good games for cellphones. That made me think. After all, most articles about games for cellphones starts like this: "Cellphone game - are they any good yet?" With a text below saying "No, return in about six months." After all, most Games for Cellphones are replicas of real games. Splinter Cell, for example.

Maybe Games for cellphones are a good place for us indies? The business is rather empty, Gameloft.com being one of the bigger names. Developing games for cellphones using Java can't be that difficult. What do you think? Do anyone here have any experience of the business, or the way of developing?

[Adrian Cummings]

Hmmmm some games might seem to be crap and some are of course, but given that the commercial side of the mobile phone games business requires the games in most cases to run on creaky old handsets as well as new ones makes that a good reason why this sort of limitation can makes games a bit dire in the first place - some of the older phones you have to work on are really crud!.

On the other hand mobile hardware is getting better and there are going to be far more chances of getting better games on these devices as the mobile market expands and people junk there older phones for much better devices over time.

Better to be in on the ground now than not at all and waiting, is what I say :)

[Michael Flad]

Adrian is right - and better not underestimate whats already neccessary to create really good versions of a game on each popular phone series.

An info from the latest Gameloft press release shows how big the market already is.

"Continuing the strategy of international expansion and market share gains in the context of strong market growth, Gameloft significantly increased its production capacity during the first half of 2005. Gameloft’s total workforce increased between June 2004 and June 2005 from 432 to 1,375 employees, of which close to 1,200 are developers. "

Now you have to see that in a relation to their releases to be even more amazed - they only release a new game every 1-2 month. I worked on a J2ME game with another company and the game took easily 3-4 manyears of development which is easy to spend as soon as you'r reaching the limits of the devices and you have to spend quit some time on each single feature and later deviceport.
It's obviously more easy for smaller games.

In general, creating the next Cellphone superhit is already more work than the next Zuma etc. - but then, the market for Cellphonegames might get much bigger so it's still a very interesting market.

[lakibuk]

That's the technical side.
But what about the marketing part?
It's impossible for an indie to sell mobile games from his website like we do it with PC and MAC games,right?
You have to develop for a publisher who has enough money for tv ads and such. Or am i wrong?

[baegsi]

This has been discussed a few times already. This question would be good for a sticky.

I started mobile development ~2 years ago. My impressions are following:

Most important: don't assume mobile games are easier to develop because they are small. Quite the opposite is true. Limited memory, crappy low end phones require to squezze everything out of a phone. That makes developing games really hard, especially if you intend to make "good"/ambitious games.
There's high competition, many big players are well positioned. A lot of merging and money changing hands is going on. The situation is worse than casual games
As phones become better, the situation for indies evolves much more into a console like setting. Compare NGage - not possible to develop for unknown indies.
The rate at which and how phones are pushed into the market creates a lot of pressure on small teams.
In order to make serious money, you have to go through an aggregator. The indie shareware-model does not work here (yet)


I think pc and mac market is much better suited for small teams. Yes, the growth rate is still high, but at the same time a lot of vc money is pumped into the market and the question is whether it's clever to compete head to head with the big players.

If you still consider developing mobile games, I suggest following:

Talk to other small developers who are making a living with mobile games about their experience
Talk to aggregators what they expect from a game developer
Start developing for the smallest, crappiest phone that you want to target
Don't assume you can make better games than gameloft (or elkware (now infospace), macrospace (now glu) and so on). This is a road into desperation. Instead, pick a very small game project to begin with.


Besides that: ask yourself: do you really like playing games on phones? Especially since the next generation of handhelds like psp, nintendo ds etc? You really have to like mobile games, i.e very small and easy games, games you play a couple of minutes between changing busses. That's not for everyone.

Edit: I don't want to spoil any ambitions here. I believe with the right attitude, developing mobile games can be profitable. But it requires imho a lot of good business sense to make serious money. Personally, I wouldn't do it, and just wanted to warn about false assumptions. However, there's definitely room. Also, look into multiplayer mobile game development. No doubt: there's the real money for mobile games, the only question is when.

Edit 2: And consider doing an adgame for a company. That way you could start with funding. Mobile games are well suited for avertising. Try to find Flash developers. Very often, a company that wants to have a flash game for advertising also likes the idea of having a mobile version. IMHO this one of the most feasible route a small indie team can begin with.

[Cogin]

Practicaly mobile operators have monopolly on end-user distribution, because they can easily add game cost to mobile bill. There aren't other profitable ways to take 3-5 euros/$ from user.
Another problem is mobile operators won't deal with small developers - you have to go through distributor/publisher.
You can check my ski jumping game made in early 2003
http://www.cogin.com/projects/SkiFlying/

I had 5-6 publishing contracts, only one of them succeeded to push this game to some web sites, but declined any communication afterwards.
I never made a dime from it.

There were some very favourable reviews from people who like ski jumping. If I could sell it over internet it would probably be successful in that niche, but anything that's not mainstream doesn't have much chance to go pass publisher/distributor/operator combination.

[Anlino]

Sorry for the "Cellphone games are easy make" thing. A bad assumption, especially since i didn't examine it first.

I have tried a language aiming at cellphones/PDAs. It is called Omegabasic, and you can find info about it at The Game Creators (http://www.thegamecreators.com) website. But i didn't buy it - games for cellphones wasn't a alternative for me at that point. (I don't even own a cellphone :rolleyes: )

Thanks for all of your comments and opinions.