Apple’s iPhone a carrot for game developers

Mobile gaming continues to languish, plagued by a lack of innovation, overpriced titles and the constraints of tiny screens and 12-key pads. But game makers are hoping that Apple Inc.’s iPhone changes all that.
Perhaps no other space in mobile content has been hyped to the degree mobile gaming has. Yet publishers have long struggled to surpass the “golden nickel” – the 5% (or less) of consumers who download games to their phones – even as a handful of other mobile applications finally begin to gain traction.
Apple’s release of the iPhone SDK (software development kit) last month has given developers and publishers hope, however, and for good reason: Not only does the device rock a 3.5-inch screen, it couples intuitive navigation controls with high-end features such as a 3-D graphics processor and touch screen, potentially bridging the gap between voice-centered feature phones and multimedia-capable PCs. And game makers are salivating over the accelerometer – the gyroscope-type feature that detects when the phone is held vertically, horizontally or tilted at an angle.
Sega Mobile yesterday said it will offer an iPhone version of “Super Monkey Ball,” a popular console title that debuted as a stand-alone arcade game in 2000. The title challenges players to guide a sphere-encased monkey through a series of platforms; a player loses a life when the ball rolls off the virtual floor. But while gamers on other platforms control the action with a joystick, the iPhone version allows them to play by moving the device itself, according to Ethan Einhorn, a producer for Sega Mobile.
“The accelerometer allows you tilt the device, and through very subtle motions of your hand you can get the monkey to move,” Einhorn said. “That’s literally the experience you get; it’s such a cool thing to bring to handheld gaming. You’ve never been able to do that in a handheld.”
Apple’s release of the SDK has opened the floodgates for publishers, spurring a host of announcements that read more like love letters to the device than press releases. Gameloft was quick to commit resources to the platform, vowing to produce more than 15 titles for the device by the end of the year. And the accelerometer will be a key feature in many – if not all – of those titles.
“With traditional handsets, the control pad required learning and a bit of training to master,” said Gonzague de Vallois, Gameloft’s senior VP of publishing. “The accelerometer allows for a very simple gaming experience that is easy to pick up for the non-gamer. . (It) pushes the boundary in terms of how your mobile is able to ‘read’ you and not the other way around.”
That kind of fawning – and an overall lack of traction – helps explain why developers are pouring resources into a device that, for now, accounts for a small fraction of the overall handset market. And it’s not just the iPhone that’s getting attention from developers yearning to break free of feature-phone limitations. EA Mobile this week announced plans to offer more games for high-end, enterprise-focused devices such as smartphones running Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Mobile, Symbian and Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry. Nokia Corp.’s N-Gage platform also promises to push the mobile-gaming envelope, exploiting cutting-edge features on the company’s most advanced devices.
The impact of such efforts is sure to be felt as the market share for smartphones increases and the audience for iPhones expands beyond early adopters to reach business users and soccer moms. Such devices could prove a much-needed sweet spot for mobile gaming, which has stagnated as publishers have tried to cram console-type games onto phones ill-suited for sophisticated gaming. And publishers are hoping traction on high-end devices trickles down as the line between smartphones and feature phones continues to blur.
“We believe fully in the potential of the iPhone to grow the mobile games market,” Vallois said via e-mail. “When you look at the current handsets on the market now, most of them have size limitations of (600 kilobytes to 2 megabytes.) The iPhone is introducing a new level of games that we consider to be ‘rich games;’ games that are about 10 MB and very competitive to console (games). Essentially, the iPhone will be the convergence between mobile and console games.”