July 15th, 2009 @ The Hilton Metropole, Brighton
The Develop Industry Excellence Awards is the only event which rewards the work done by Europe’s leading games development companies.
October 27th, 2009 @ BAFTA, London
The London Games Conference will take place during the increasingly popular London Games Festival.
High data rates force mobile studio’s hand
Mobile game developer Fishlabs has started delivering its titles to users via e-mail attachments, as a response to the high cost of over-the-air data transferral.
At this year’s GDC Mobile experts discussed how data rates were one of the factors that slowed growth in the mobile gaming sector in 2007, especially as the rates are much higher for pre-paid users – a large number of which are the young gamers that mobile developers are targeting.
"Because our high quality 3D Java games have sophisticated graphics and offer several hours of gameplay, they can be up to a megabyte in size, which is relatively large,” said Michael Schade, Fishlabs CEO and co-founder.
“So as of now we are offering hassle and cost free delivery of our mobile games as e-mail attachments. The mobile game can then be transferred quite simply from the PC to the mobile phone via data cable or Bluetooth connection. This means that our customers not only save on data transfer costs, they also have a backup copy if the game is accidentally deleted or the mobile phone software is updated."
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Good idea, makes sense. BUT isn't this indicative of why the whole mobile game thing simply isn't taking off?
Oh, I thought they were implying that receiving email on phones is free... Why not deliver by download then? If you're on your PC at their website, why not Right Click and Save As, rather than having to open your email?
It's one of the reasons mobile phone games haven't taken off. The quality isn't quite good enough either as the phones aren't powerful enough and there's not enough reviewing of games to see what is good and what isn't (other than pocketgamer). Phone companies release too many handsets, which makes it impossible to optimise games to the platform, and then the cost of buying and receiving a game is too high.
The depth and complexity is normally around that of Flash games, and Flash games are free to at least try. So why take a random punt on a mobile game that's going to cost £5 (operator deck costs are usually at least this), plus £2.50 on data transfer costs, when you could play something for free elsewhere?
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