mobile gaming update

Filed in archive Technology on March 8, 2004

I was writing about mobile gaming a while ago. It seems the industry is maturing recently.

Jamba the ubiquitous German provider of mobile ring tones and games got some further investment for expanding their business into the US.

One of the key issues that still have to be resolved in the field of mobile roaming are latency and roaming. The slow ping times between a handset and the mobile basis station make faster games between different handsets owners virtually impossible. SO far the only solution before UMTS is established is to use "shadow" pre-played games and games that do no require fast interaction (i.e. chess). Also there is no GSM roaming (sub) standard for games between different mobile providers. Recently I was visiting Exit Games a company based in Hamburg that is working on a set of standards to enable an easy multi player gaming between players around the world. They are developing this in line with the industry initiative "OMA" which wants to resolve the conflict of competing standards. Exitgames is on a good way to be the enabler helping game developers and platform providers to reach interactivity.

Also I learned more about one of the dinosaurs of mobile gaming. Elkware based close to Hamburg is a "pure" developer of mobile games and has been around for more than 5 years now. It's now Germany's leading developer of mobile games with 35 developers.