Pros and Cons of Mobile Game Development

The upside and downside of developing games for the mobile phone market.

By Ralph Edwards
Updated: 16 Jun 2012 5:25 pm
Posted: 6 Jun 2006 8:56 pm
The market for developing games for the mobile phone market has been seen for the past several
years as one with such an enormous amount of potential with the least amount of risk.

It's been a place where current gaming industry giants have managed to dominate - take EA
Mobile's 28.8% market share for the quarter that ended on March 2006 according to M:Metrics,
Inc.'s survey of U.S. mobile phone subscribers - while also allowing smaller lesser-known
studios to still develop games and be profitable, an accomplishment that is becoming near
impossible to do for smaller companies that don't have the financial muscle to keep up with the
costs of each successive generation of console releases.

The mobile market is seen as one that's still not fully tapped and one where independent game
developers can manage to thrive and be truly creative and innovative with the games they choose
to make. In today's piece, we'll take a look at some of the pros and cons of developing games for
this colossal and still-growing market.

Pros
The biggest reason that developers see potential in developing games for the mobile phone
market is that the potential market for the games is unequalled in size. According to CTIA-The
Wireless Association's wireless industry survey results, there are an estimated 207.9 million
wireless phone subscribers alone, which is doubly impressive when you consider that the current
population of the United States is hovering at right around 298.9 million at the moment.

When you expand that to a worldwide level, you are looking at a subscriber base that's expected
to reach 2.5 billion by the end of 2006 and 3.5 billion by the end of 2010, according to the
research of the wireless network strategies service of Strategy Analytics. And, for the record, the
current population of the world is estimated at 6.5 billion at the moment according to the
International Programs Center, U.S. Bureau of the Census.

Those are installed bases that any console maker would kill for and one that you wouldn't even
need to make a dent in on an overall basis in order to make a game that gets purchased,
downloaded and played by a million users.

The pluses of trying to tap that huge potential market is strengthened furthermore by the
extremely low entry costs of developing mobile phone games when compared to console and PC
game development. A hurdle that is flat out insurmountable by smaller companies when it
pertains to console game development, particularly when the next-generation machines are
concerned.
Since mobile phone gaming technology can be likened to that of what we had in the early '90s of
videogame consoles, it's one of the few places where we still see games being developed by
small teams of only a handful of individuals, like was the case in the "good ole days" according
to some. Smaller teams means more creative control for those working on the game and a lot less
overhead for whomever is funding it. Unless, your dad's name is Bill Gates or you happened to
make a killing selling your stocks of Google, it's unlikely that you, your parents, or your friends
have enough capital to fund the development of a game for Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's
PlayStation 3 or Nintendo's Wii.

The lower costs of development also have its advantages in other areas of game development.
First, it allows companies, both big and small, to take a little more risk with the types of games
they try to develop and opens the door to be more innovative with both a game's play mechanics
and genre, as well as its characters and story. Game companies are often scared to take risks on
new original IP's (Intellectual Properties) because of the sales needed to be profitable making
console games, so the current trend is to rely on sequels of titles that already have a well-known
name and user base or new games based on already-developed and known characters, storylines
and licenses.

When making a game for a console, a company might feel the need to try and go out and buy a
license for a title that they're working on to help sell it and quite possibly curtail the innovative
things that their designers may wish to do with the game, just because they see the hurdle of
marketing an unknown IP as one they don't wish to try and cross. It's just a lot easier to try and
market a game that's based on already-known and loved characters, storylines and licenses. And
if you don't agree, just ask yourself, if someone comes out with an unlicensed football game
that's superior to EA's NFL exclusive football franchises, do you think it will have even a
snowball's chance of surviving in Hell of outselling EA's monolith? It's not very likely, no matter
how good of a football game it may be.

Since the costs are significantly lower to make games for this market, developers have the option
of sticking with exactly what they want to do and have the freedom to just tick with their guns
because it takes less to be profitable so there's not as much of a need to rely solely on a
purchased license or already successful franchise to make it completely worth developing
whatever game they wish to develop.

Cons
There may be 207.9 million wireless phone subscribers in the United States and 2.5 billion
worldwide, but that doesn't mean that there are that many people that will necessarily download
new games, let alone pay for and download new games. According to M:Metrics, Inc.'s research,
only 24.2% of U.S. subscribers played any game at all on their mobile phones in the 3-month
period of the survey, and only 8.3% that played a downloaded game, and a mere 2.7% that
downloaded any mobile at all in the past month.

While 6 million downloaded games might seem quite impressive, you must consider that there's
a glutton of mobile games on the market so each game's share of this is quite small in size. The
truth is that while the subscriber base is massive in size that the market for mobile games hasn't
yet completely caught on. It is a growing one, however, and, obviously, can't be ignored.
Another one of the cons in developing games for the mobile phone market is that there are more
operators to deal with and they're the ones with complete control in this world. Instead of dealing
with Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo in the console world or virtually nobody in the PC world,
when making games for the mobile phone market you must rely heavily on the decisions made
by the providers like Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, Cingular, and Nextel.

To make things worse, the operators hold even more control over what games sell to their users
because the mass majority of consumers only purchases services for their phones directly
through their wireless operator. While it's possible to download games from the Internet that
aren't offered by their service provider, most people have shown the tendency to only download
and pay for ones that are made available through their provider. Like the console manufacturers,
the operators have quality requirements for games they'll offer through their service and this
usually entails that they work on the majority of their handsets that their customers currently use.

This leads to the next problem, which is that there are an outrageous number of different mobile
phone devices to support and the market is so fragmented that it's key to support as many as
humanly possible. This has created a situation where the engineering costs of mobile phone
game development is much higher in comparison to the game's overall budget than when
compared to console or PC games. Not only does your game have to be on the right mobile
phone software platform, of which BREW and J2ME seem to be the most popular options at the
moment, but it needs to support each of the different devices, which all have countless different
screen sizes, input abilities, and limits to their computing power. Making a game that works well
on T-Mobile's Sidekick II and then making sure it's also functional on any other random phone
can prove to be a difficult and somewhat daunting task.

The lack of processing power of many devices and the fact that even the most advanced ones
aren't going to be equals to the current generation of videogame handhelds also means that
developers are limited in what kinds of games that they can develop. You are mostly limited to
the same types of games that were developed in the 8- and 16-bit eras and ideas that need
advanced 3D graphics and many of the innovations that came from this will most likely be not
possible to do. Subsequently, while you may have the freedom to take risks, you may not
necessarily have the ability to be as creative and innovative as you could be had you had the
computing power or input devices of current and next-generation console and PC games.

In Conclusion
The interest in mobile game development is huge and is still growing and it's easy to see why
given the low cost of entry and the incomparable user base that's out there. However, it's not one
that's necessarily proven, nor is it something that's headache free and a guaranteed gold mine.
Nevertheless, it's currently one of the few places where Independent game developers have a
shot at all of getting their games developed for, so it's a market that shouldn't be ignored by both
those making games and those buying them.