Keitai

An informative post by Chetan Sharma in Seattle yesterday. He offers a round-up of last week’s Mobile Gaming Conference and brings up a few points that I feel are specifically relevant to Flash Lite developers.

Missing the big picture – Except for some of the seasoned industry veterans like Daishiro Okada (Square Enix), Trip Hawkins (Digital Chocolate), Chris Early (Microsoft), Mark Pierce (SHFF), and some others, most (esp. the smaller players) seemed to be operating in a world of their own, unaware or uninterested in what’s currently going on outside the mobile gaming space and how it might impact their respective businesses. As pointed out above, mobile gaming is shifting gears and people who aren’t watching for trends and developments outside their sub-segment will be creamed within the next 12 months. Developers will benefit from looking at the developments in the areas of mobile music, mobile search, voice recognition, mobile video & broadcasting, mobile advertising, near field communications, etc. As Mark Pierce noted, his experience in working on projects with Jumptap (mobile search), v-enable (voice search), Autodesk (location), Mobot (visual search), Vibetones (vibration), GestureTech (motion, tilt) helped him gain a broader perspective of the industry that he can apply to his passion of building mobile games. Conference attendees would have also benefited from the perspective of infrastructure vendors like Ericsson and Motorola – what’s coming and when? For e.g. SIP and IMS will have a direct impact on the mobile gaming market but they were barely uttered by any of the speakers…

The big thing to note here (I think) is that this whole paragraph is really about mobile—not gaming. Developing mobile games requires an understanding (and genuine interest in) all sorts of aspects of the mobile industry—including at times confusing and initially arcane sounding ones like:

• differences between network standards and platforms (CDMA, GSM, UMTS, BREW etc.)
• handset brands (not so much who releases what, but how OEM market share and brand perception varies and how this may affect your product’s marketability in a regional go-to-market scenario,)
• cultural mobile habits
• the differences in mobile marketing practices/codes of conduct that may also affect your product.

Whether we like it or not, mobile is a different beast. It’s really not that different from our early Flash (and web) experiences with clients and stakeholders who were stubbornly trying to reproduce print on the web. It’s also not terribly helpful that Flash means different things to different people—like an animator friend of ours who works in Flash all day producing award-winning broadcast shorts for the Cartoon Network but has no idea how to make a button. All these people (their employers, and clients)—with potentially no mobile background whatsoever—may soon be experimenting with Flash for mobile.

Is there anything we can do to make this transition a bit easier than the print-to-web one was?

[BTW—Before everyone freaks out, I'm not suggesting there are no good Flash Lite games, no great developers or that J2ME folks have it all figured out either. Just that those two million Flash developers Adobe keeps talking about come with a lot of baggage. Not all baggage is bad, but it's still baggage. :-)]