ESPOO, Finland-Mobile phone giants L.M. Ericsson, Motorola Inc., Nokia Corp. and Siemens Information and Communication Mobile Group today announced yet another standards initiative, this time aimed at the mobile gaming market.
The companies’ Mobile Games Interoperability Forum “evolved” out of the Universal Mobile Games Platform initiative announced in March, the companies said. The UMGP included Ericsson, Motorola and Siemens but not Nokia.
Now, with the addition of the world’s No. 1 mobile phone company, the MGI Forum is working to “define a mobile games interoperability specification for network-based services,” the companies said. This latest standards move comes after a variety of other standards initiates, some of which-the M-Services initiative, for example-already include gaming standards. Other recently announced standards efforts are the Wireless Village initiative, the Enhanced Messaging Service initiative and the multimedia messaging service initiative. Most of these standards forums count Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson and Siemens as founding members.
The phone manufacturers said the MGI Forum will eventually allow game developers to produce and deliver games that work across a range of networks and devices. Today, most games and other applications are not interoperable, a situation many see as an obstacle to the widespread acceptance of the wireless Internet.
The MGI Forum is open to all gaming companies and developers, and will work to ensure an open development environment, the companies said. The forum will also develop software development kits for game designers.
