Mobile Games: What to expect in the near Future

The current mobile gaming market is filled with the socalled casual games. Simple and easy, these games are well suited for devices with limited resources and for people who play games now and then. This is why Tetris and Pac-man are among the best sellers games of several mobile games charts. In this paper we analyze current developing platforms, networking technologies, delivery models and game characteristics of the current mobile gaming scenario, in order to identify directions that will lead to the near future of the mobile gaming scenario. THE MOBILE GAMING MARKET The success and the popularity of mobile games are making the mobile gaming a successful market. Expectations are high as reported by different research reports, which forecast the mobile gaming market between 10 and 20 US$ billions by 2011 (see, Gibson (2006)). Nowadays the mobile gaming scenario is filled with a wide range of games (from very simple graphic games to cutting edge 3D graphics; from single to multi players games) (see, Figure 1). However, looking at today’s mobile gaming market sales, it is interesting to note that customers prefer the so-called casual games, easy and simple to play. Just see the best sellers mobile game charts of different cellphone network operators, to note that most of the titles are simple and easy to play: Tetris, Pac-Man, Pong, Frogger, just to name a few. The success of casual games has various reasons: i) mobile games are basically used by normal people, the so-called casual gamers, to kill time or to mitigate boredom and are not meant to replace powerful gaming console, ii) limited screen size and input keyboard are a burden for complex games, whereas they are sufficient for casual games, iii) old titles, usually simple and easy to play, are familiar to a large segment of current mobile device’s owners and familiarity is an important factor in a game purchase decision (see, Telephia (2007)), iv) the computational power of current cellphones is limited with respect to gaming console, but is comparable to the one of old gaming console, and hence sufficient to support simple games. Will casual games play a fundamental role in the future of the mobile gaming market? Will casual gamers be principal target of the game industry? Will hardcore gamers be more considered in the future mobile gaming scenario? In this paper we analyze the current mobile gaming scenario in order to identify directions that will lead to the near future of the mobile gaming scenario. In doing this, we focus on developing platforms, networking and graphics technologies, delivery models and games characteristics. Based on the highlighted directions, the future mobile gaming scenario is likely to be no longer focused on casual gamers, but hardcore gamers will be the main target; casual games and complex games will coexist and mobile games will massively use features like multi-player capabilities, social aspects, location and proximity information and high quality graphics. Figure 2 summarizes a possible evolution of the mobile gaming scenario. DEVELOPING PLATFORMS Today, the mobile scenario suffers from a considerable platform fragmentation problem (see, Koivisto (2006)), which is a real burden for the popularity of mobile applications and of mobile gaming in particular. In addition, since the number of different mobile devices is enormous, game developers are practically unable to release a game version for any different platform and for any different mobile device. Needless to say, making a game available to the entire mobile market is almost impossible, as the inter-platforms porting cost may be higher than the developing cost of the entire game. Currently, Java ME, Brew, Symbian and Flash Lite are the most popular software platforms used to develop mobile games. Java Micro Edition (Java ME) is a collection of technologies and specifications to develop software for devices with limited resources and is currently the most ubiquitous application platform for mobile device. The main advantage of using Java ME is that an application can be written once and can be used on every device Java ME compatible. However, the only way to guarantee that the developed application will run on a particular device is to test it on that particular device. Needless to say, this is a limitation. Furthermore, Java ME applications run slowly compared to applications specifically Snake Tetris Nba live 2008 A dog’s