Mobile Casual and iPod

[Dyno Kid]

Hi guys,

Well it seems for a small indie like myself getting a game on XBLA DS or PSP is going to impossible but-

How easy is it to make mobile phone or iPod games?

What engine would i need and is there a market for them?

Darren.

[joe]

for mobil devices there are often sdk's on the website of manufacturer.

[sillytuna]

Hi mate, you can't develop games on iPod (officially), and mobile phone is
definitely not for you.

We do a lot of mobile phone work and it's not something I recommend even to commercial developers unless they hire staff with significant experience or outsource. Quite simply don't go there.

You could look at PDA perhaps. It's a niche market but there's a living to be made if you're good at it and can write good C++ code.

GBA is a dead market - forget about it. However, you can start on DS with homebrew development then approach publishers with a demo.

Word of warning though - as others on here have mentioned to you, you do seem a little too insular in your game development - specifically with regard to quality and feedback. Casual publishers smell of roses compared to traditional publishers and mobile phone operators.

[killarkai]

You can get started in mobile by downloading the wireless toolkit for j2me from java.sun.com.

IDE wise you can use either Netbeans or Eclipse, both of them have plugins for mobile.

To port to manufacturer specific devices(Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, etc), you may need to download additional APIs, in this case go to the developer sites of the respective brands.

I agree with sillytuna, mobile is not for indies.

Check out some of the top ten mobile charts. I can assure that you most of those that sell well are games port over from famous existing IPs or taken from movies. Sounds eerily like the mainstream game market huh.

Additionally, the barrier to entry to mobile is very low and that kinda makes the market saturated with bad, bad games. Customers don't get the try-before-you-buy model (though I heard its slowly being experimented in the mobile space). So its reasonable that after they get burnt once or twice (buying bad games) they will stick to buying brands/IP that they already know(a mission impossible 5 game for instance).

Any indies out there selling well in mobile?

[Bad Sector]

I'll know how this comes soon, i suppose, since i'm near the completion of the first mobile game, which will published by a small mobile games company here in Greece...

Also there are many mobile phone portals around who may want your games. Big portals, such as Handago, won't do it: i'm talking about in-country portals. There are a few here in Greece which have ads in almost any magazine available and i know that lots of people are buying these games. Try to seek such portals in your country.

However it is a drawback that user's can try-before-buy. In fact, in many cases they can't event see a screenshot - only a title, if they buy it from their phone company.

I'll report my experiences here, if people are interested (although i always though Indiegamer boards to be abount PC games...).

[sillytuna]

Any kind of indie games can be discussed here :0

re: Mobile - we'll also be able to comment further on this soon. We've handled a lot of licensed work on mobile, but are now creating some of our own designs and polishing them up to be suitable for larger mobile publishers. These are games which are indie/casual in style as well as being created in-house.

Feedback so far has been excellent, but ask me more in 6 months time!

For selling smaller, solo games, there are one or two others on this board who can tell you more. You need to be prepared to do one or more reskins of your games, need to port heavily, and need to have polished artwork.

[Bad Sector]

For my game, at least, i think that my artwork was good enough (it could be better if i had enough time to practice on it, though). But this doesn't seem to be a major problem, i've seen many games with crappy artwork (note: this is not an excuse to make bad art, it is just something i personally observed).

The biggest problem with mobile phone game development is the different screen sizes. There are simply lots of them and you must design your game to be resolution independent.

I tried to make my game resolution independent, but even if i spent a lot of time thinking about that and even if the game does run without problem in different phones, i had to make three different versions for each category of screen sizes (small - think nokia series 40, old motorolas, medium - think series 60, sony erricson P-series, current motorolas, big - think new series 40/60, sagem and some others).

Fortunatelly, the mobile manufacturers seem to go towards a standard resolution of 240x320 and there are many phones with that resolution. Even the new Nokias have it. But we're far from saying that it is safe to bet on that resolution (there are lots of 176x208 based Series 60 and many 128x128 based Series 40 around, not to mention all those weird Motorola and Sony Erricson screens).

MIDP is also another problem, with MIDP 1 still being around in some older devices, although AFAIK phones are not produced with it anymore. If you can overcome the limitations it imposes, you will make your life much easier. I did. If you don't mind losing a portion of the market, you'll be much better with MIDP 2 and if you want to make your life hard, use MIDP 1 + vendor specific extensions (you'll need some build system to automate this, possibly with a Java preprocessor, or it's gonna be really painful).

Personally i use MIDP 1 without vendor-specific extensions - since it's my first try on making something commercial (some years ago i made a free J2ME game (http://www.slashstone.com/badsector/index.php?p=12) from my old Nokia 3410, though) i want as larger marget as possible (more people, less chances to fail... i think). If you're clever you can do a lot of stuff, although i miss MIDP 2's pixel level access... :-/.

Note also that some publishers require from you to provide versions for all major phone categories (usually slow s40, fast s40, slow s60 and fast s60) or they refuse to publish your game. Personally i have a Nokia 7210 (slow s400) and a Nokia 6600 (fast s60) to test my game, so at least i know it runs in those.

[oldschool]

Dyno Kid I assume since your last game was in gamemaker that you are or will be looking at Game Editor (http://game-editor.com/) for the portable market. If you or anyone else has any info on it I'd like to know. if your unaware this is from the website:

Game Editor is designed to be portable across all popular platforms, including Windows (95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, 2003, XP), Linux, Pocket PC, Handheld PC, GP2X and Windows Mobile-based Smartphones.

If my assumption is wrong then sorry.

good luck

[Applewood]

Mobile phone development was my best ever gig. Once, our company made 6000 quid for 10 minutes' work. That takes some beating!

The market is hopelessly dead now. Do not even consider it unless you get a publisher to pay you and supply 97 bazillion different phones to port to. Our company specialised in mobile (hence the name) but now we don't even phone out to get more, and no-one is phoning in anymore. If you're any good, it's easier to make money on practically any other platform imo.

If you want to sit at home programming and also want to make proper money, get some freelancing stuff in and see how you do at that - it's good for making contacts and it pays the bills.

EDIT: Except for PDA. Expect to make a grand a game their, in total sales, ever.

[Pyabo]

Yes, it's official... the mythical billion dollar mobile game market is now over.

Surely this (http://www.gameloft.com/new_shopping.php?product=121&product_name=Paris%20Hilton's%20Diamond%20Quest&clid=15) marks the true end of the hype.

[Applewood]

Not sure if that was meant as sarcasm or not.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if the mobile market was in fact worth much more than that. The central problem is that for each of those dollars, there's a small company punting out games from a website

Take it from me as someone who knows. Selling your own mobile stuff from a website won't make you more money than a pc game and will be considerably harder work, also requiring a lot of spend on phones. (thousands)

All the sure-fire ways to make money (like getting jamdat or someone to publish for you) is also practically gone. It's now mostly internal dev with branded titles only.

EDIT: If you trace my posts, you'll find I used to recommend this type of work wholeheartedly, so the fact that I now don't should speak volumes. The ship has sailed!

[sillytuna]

Applewood, it's mostly branded content although not exclusively is we've found out. Europe seems more branding led than the US surprisingly.

Also, there's plenty of external development that goes on. Perhaps you've just been unlucky. It's more a case of how profitable it is considering porting, operators, aggregators etc. Until you have direct to customer sales in significant numbers, it's going to remain tricky.

[Applewood]

I understand that there may be some external contracting still to be had, but my main thrust is that just doing something on a website of your own back isn't going to be worth the effort. Not even a little bit.

Not sure about being unlucky in the mobile space. We've certainly stopped getting calls from all our old clients as they've all to a man took it in house. We've not aggressively tried to get new clients as XBLA is our new target as the work's easier, more fun and more profitable. YMMV though.

[Pyabo]

Well, my skoffing at this market is mostly a result of the absolute hyperbole the mobile carriers have tried to sell us for years now. For a while there, you couldn't surf an industry site at all without running across some report or another about how the mobile games business was set to skyrocket and that it's going to be worth $5 billion by 2007 and blah blah blah. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Of course, all those "reports" and market studies were done by carriers looking for a few extra pennies out of their customers, desperate for the next phone feature that sets their crap apart from their neighbor. (Hey, I got a great idea... let's put a really shitty camera in our phone!)

If anyone can show me proof that there was even $10 million worth of mobile game sold in the last year, I'd eat my shoe.

[Applewood]

It depends on where you live. Having seen an average java phone, I can see why no-one buys the games - they're all shite.

However, the BREW market in the US is a different story - a lot of money is at stake their, as whilst there are still the hopeless incompatibility stories, many phones are actually capable of playing more than whack-a-mole which induces user to actually buy them.

I still see about a thousand sales a month of shadowgate, 18 months later.http://uk.gamespot.com/mobile/rpg/shadowgateclassic/index.html Shame I don't get a bean in royalties :(

The downside is that BREW has been a dodgy-handshake, rolled up trouser leg club for quite a while - even before java dev tanked. If your name's not down, you're not coming in!

[Michael Flad]

The market was forced to grow to fast and the main forces behind the scenes were not really that interested and even less experienced in that sort of content because even numbers exceptionally great from our point of view is just peanuts compared with what simple services as SMS creates for them.

$10 million - easily, the top Brew title of a year might generate that number alone.

Do some research f.i. Gameloft alone creates numbers like that:
"Paris, 27 July 2006.
Gameloft achieved consolidated sales of 15.8m€ in the second quarter of 2006, up by 50% from the previous year. The group's sales in the first half of 2006 were up by 50% over the same period last year, at 30.5 million euros."

The technology advanced to fast, handset turnaround times were to short(no time to fix existing problems and additionally introducing new ones) and the whole market (distribution as well as the users) were not able to keep pace with that. I.e. it's hard for a casual users to get the phones wap/gprs settings right, there's only very little information about the games available etc.

My bet is - everything's cooling down a bit but it will continue to grow - and over time there will be better and more comfortable solutions for the enduser as well as those becoming more used to the way everything works. New ways for distribution will appear, the lowest common handset for developers will eventually reach a reasonable level.
Mobile phones won't fade away anytime soon and neither will the games.