The wireless industry is beginning to see its first successes in the fledgling mobile gaming market, but carriers, developers and publishers have been reluctant to take advantage of the one element of mobile gaming that makes it unique: the network. Despite the billions of dollars of investment in 3G networks and the enormous creative outpouring into the sector of late, the network in mobile gaming is used for little beyond maintaining leader boards and downloading the games themselves. With a few exceptions, head-to-head competition and the sophisticated online communities have failed to materialize. That may be about to change.

“People are tuning into the multi-player gaming experience,” said Tammy Robinson, manager of games, content and programming for Verizon Wireless. “I wouldn't argue that it would subsidize the gaming industry for the next couple of years, but it's starting first with casual games and group games and moving from there.”

At the gaming industry's biggest annual to-do, the E3 Expo, developers and publishers unveiled their plans for a more a connected gaming world. Microsoft made perhaps the biggest splash, announcing it would take its successful Xbox Live program — which links millions of console gamers over broadband connections — to mobile phones in an initiative called Live Anywhere.

The onboard comprehensive portal not only acts as a central portal from which to preview, rent, buy and review games, it also acts as community and multi-player gaming portal. It lets users initiate head-to-head sessions and even trash talk in the process. Most ambitiously, however, Live Anywhere links the Xbox and mobile gaming communities together so customers can play casual games across the two platforms. It's the first attempt by any game company to bridge the wireless and wireline gaming worlds.

Although Bill Gates' announcement at E3 drew the most attention, Microsoft wasn't the only company attempting to end the mobile games isolation on the phone deck. Nokia announced Japan's Taito has agreed to build its hit title “Bust-A-Move” on the SNAP multi-player game hosting platform, making head-to-head play possible across Nokia's hosted data centers worldwide.

Motricity and AirG added a social lounge to Sprint's Game Lobby portal, allowing player-to-player communication for the first time. And several developers released titles with implicit network play built in. The most significant of those was mDisney's “Pirates of the Caribbean,” a game that not only allows up to 16 players to pit their ships against one another in a simulated nautical combat, but does so in real time over a CDMA 1X or GPRS/EDGE network — a feat that almost all other publishers have said is impossible over today's infrastructure.

Larry Shapiro, Walt Disney Internet Group North America general manager, said mDisney and developer Floodgate Entertainment invested more than a year to create “Pirates,” bypassing the central latency issues that inhibit real-time network games. “Pirates” is far more than a proof-of-concept game, though, Shapiro said. It's the first in what he believes will be a shift from the stand-alone game — downloaded and paid for once — to a subscription model, in which users continue to pay for games after the initial download. Not only does “Pirates” have a longer shelf life because of its multi-player aspects, but he said mDisney plans to offer new maps and scenarios, basically recreating the game every few months for additional charges.

“It's the notion of subscription gaming,” Shapiro said. “That's something we're seeing a high level of interest in from consumers and carriers.”

Almost all publishers have instituted some kind of connected framework to their mobile games, but those efforts mainly revolve around competing for high scores over the network on leader boards or hosted tournaments. Many publishers have achieved limited success in drawing users to those portals, and they all agree on the benefits of expanding those social and community aspects over the network. However, they vary greatly over the next step, which is enabling true multi-player gaming. Some argue that the networks and the habits of wireless users will never support multi-player gaming, while others say head-to-head play is inevitable but still off on the horizon.

“It would be great to have real-time multi-player games, but right now, we're limited to turn-based games,” which aren't subject to the whims of network latency, said Justin Kubiak, director of marketing for Glu Mobile. “We want to make sure that when we do multi-player, it's not just for multi-player's sake. But ultimately multi-player will be in every mobile game — it will be a critical component of the business.”

One of the reasons publishers hesitate, though, may not be the limitations of the carriers' networks but of their own networks. Most major publishers are currently hosting their own community portals. Although most of these publishers are good at creating the games themselves, building and maintaining a hosted gaming platform is not their area of expertise, said Alexandra Vogel, product manager for Germany's Exit Games.

Exit Games is part of a new breed of software and solution providers, which includes Terraplay and now Nokia SNAP, building hosted gaming solutions into which publishers can tap. Vogel said that developing the servers to post high scores or a tournament is simple, but creating a platform that will authenticate and manage the connections of thousands of simultaneous users is far more complicated.

“This is very specialized work,” she said. “It requires specialized partners.”

MAKING A MOBILE GAMES BUSINESS

Last year Capcom, like every other major game publisher, was looking to expand into the mobile space. But instead of tapping a veteran of the gaming industry to head the new Mobile & Interactive Media division, Capcom went the opposite route. The company chose Midori Yuasa, an executive who has built her career on the mobile side, first on the handset itself with Sony Electronics and then on the content side at Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Yuasa is now building a fledgling international mobile games division, launching the company in January and publishing mobile titles at a steady rate of one a month for the U.S. market. That output may be miniscule, but Yuasa said her division is determined not be overshadowed by the immensity of Capcom proper. In fact, while many of the mobile divisions of the major game publishers seem to be assigned a second-class citizen status, Yuasa said, Capcom's big-dollar console gaming and its new mobile gaming divisions are committed to working closely.

For instance, Capcom Mobile's current major project is to create a mobile version of Capcom's highly anticipated Xbox 360 game “Lost Planet,” which is scheduled for release this fall. The game is a shoot-'em-up action title set in an alien world. Although the mobile platform can't replicate the intense graphics and complicated plot produced on an Xbox, Yuasa said, the look, feel and story of the two games can be closely coordinated. The mobile version is intended to be a prequel to the console game.

“We repeatedly met with the producer of ‘Lost Planet,’ to decided which parts of the game's story can be incorporated into the mobile version,” Yuasa said during an interview at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles. “We are not only coordinating the development, but also the release. The mobile game will be released right before the console game. A lot of marketing goes on weeks before the console product is released. We can take advantage of that.”

Although Capcom is also producing independent games for the phone, mobilizing Capcom's extensive portfolio of console brands is Yuasa's primary mission. It has already released mobile versions of its popular “Mega Man” and “Resident Evil” series. Capcom Mobile already has an extensive mobile gaming portfolio to draw from in Japan, but those games were designed for far more sophisticated Japanese handsets that aren't available in the U.S.

Yuasa, however, sees promise in the mobile virtual network operators that are emerging in the U.S. Amp'd Mobile has been actively seeking advanced gaming titles it can offer exclusively, and because of its high-end and limited handset range, it can support many of the Japanese games Capcom can't release in the U.S.

“I know Amp'd has a product road map that is quite significant,” Yuasa said. “Hopefully, they can get more subscribers.”
— Kevin Fitchard