Mobile gaming goes truly mobile

While most mobile-game makers are targeting mass-market users with casual one-button offerings, boutique developer Your World Games Ltd. is hoping to find an audience with a line of sophisticated, location-aware games.
The Orlando, Fla.-based startup is putting the finishing touches on its initial offering, a GPS-enabled, multiplayer title starring Taro, a young farmer who collects items and trades for goods as he fights to defend his land from demons. Dubbed The Shroud, the role-playing offering-which is slated to hit carrier decks “in coming months”-will allow players with GPS-enabled phones to enter “quests” by physically moving into randomly determined hotspots nearby.
“It’s essentially a role-playing game,” said Robert Sprogis, vice president of Your World Games. “We sort of built it with the understanding that we were going to build a video game first, then build location-based technology into it. We weren’t creating
a GPS game just for the sake of creating a GPS game.”
Mobile enthusiasts and hardcore gamers have long salivated at the thought of location-based games that requires players to move into position to shoot an opponent, say, or capture an item in a scavenger hunt by snapping a photo.
Blister Entertainment, a subsidiary of Canadian developer KnowledgeWhere Corp., drew attention more than a year ago by launching two GPS-supported titles with Nextel Communications Inc., Boost Mobile L.L.C. and, eventually, Sprint Nextel Corp.’s iDEN network.
But so far, at least, location-aware games remain the domain of only the geekiest hardcore gamers. Swordfish and Torpedo Bay failed to resonate among mobile gamers, leading KnowledgeWhere to focus on providing location technology for a host of applications instead of simply developing location-based games.
“Uptake (of the two games) has been small,” conceded Stephen Nykolyn, KnowledgeWhere’s vice president of business development. “I think, for the most part, it was because the games didn’t hit a wide variety of handsets; not all could support it. Also, we couldn’t afford at the time to put a whole lot of marketing behind them.”
The location-based game market faces other hurdles as well. GPS-enabled games often feature expensive mapping data, and a server is required to provide location information, so games are typically more expensive than simpler titles. And most location-aware games to date require substantial mobility on the part of a user-they typically can’t be played indoors, for instance, or even near streets or crowded areas.
Developers and carriers aren’t giving up hope on the space, though. The number of GPS handsets on the market is increasing steadily, and ABI Research predicts that the number of worldwide GPS-supported location-based services will grow from 12 million last year to 315 million by 2011.
Your World Games hopes The Shroud is the game that changes, well, the game. The offering will get the benefit of marketing muscle from Sony BMG Music Entertainment, which is acting as co-publisher, and Sprogis claims the title will get deck space-a key for any new gaming offering. What’s more, The Shroud is a tiered offering: consumers with less-sophisticated handsets or only a casual interest can pick up the game and ward monsters alone, while gamers looking for a more immersive experience can experiment with the multiplayer and location-aware features.
“The difference between other location-aware games and ours is that we feel we have somewhat of a responsibility to educate the public of how to deal with location-based play,” Sprogis said. “We like to teach the public how to swim with waders, take them into the shallow end of the pool before they move to the deep end. We’ve tried to simplify the way a gamer will interact with the real-world GPS and the virtual world.”
And while the offering has yet to hit the market, it is already attracting the attention of gamers across platforms. Bloggers, enthusiasts and reviewers are slobbering over The Shroud, which in October garnered top honors from Game Informer as “the most ambitious game on the list” of top 10 wireless titles.
For location-aware gaming to gain mass-market traction, though, publishers may have to incorporate the feature in more subtle ways. A first-person shooter could treat a player to views of his hometown’s skyline, for instance, or a sports game might occur in real-life, local weather conditions. A new poker game from Concrete Software uses GPS technology to allow would-be gamblers to raise the stakes against others in the area.
Perhaps just as importantly, operators now have both the technology and the desire to offer location-aware games to subscribers, Nykolyn said. And big-name publishers with impressive licensing deals are working to oblige both carriers and consumers.
“It’s certainly narrower than we thought two years ago,” Nykolyn said of the market for GPS-enabled games. “But I still think it’s a market that has good opportunities; we’re still committed to it in a big way.. The location-based gaming market is here, and anybody who’s trying to get into it should give it a serious look.”