JavaLobby: The Multi-BILLION Dollar Java Games Mar

[Herkules]

http://www.javalobby.org/nl/archive/jlnews_20031111o.html

The Multi-BILLION Dollar Java Games Market!

I was pleasantly surprised to read of a new report from Analysys Research that predicts the Western European market for mobile games will grow more than 1000% from it's 2002 level of US$ 230 million to over US$ 3.4 BILLION by 2008! The study predicts that mobile content and entertainment services will represent 11% of total mobile service revenue and 34% of non-voice revenue. Nearly 80% of this is expected to come from sales of downloadable games, and you know that most of them will be written by developers like you in Java! This is a tremendous opportunity for those who are smart enough to get in on the action now. I only wish American wireless carriers would clean up their act and support the mobile standards that Europe and Asia have made so successful. Mobile Java would be doing a lot better in the USA if they did.    

[Preston]

Rick's right. :-)

"Prognose: Mobile Spiele werden ein Milliardenmarkt in Europa" (http://www.golem.de/0311/28382.html)
"Interview: Handy-Spiele - Der nächste große Gaming-Trend?" with Elkware Managing Director Jan Andresen (http://www.golem.de/0311/28345.html)
(These two texts are in german language only, but maybe Babelfish or Google or ... could translate it)

One point though: According to Elkware they're already trying to port "large PC games" to the mobile devices / cell phones. This will be hard for independent developers to compete with...

[DrBizzar0]

Jupp since the games isn't that resource intensive to make it will probably end up like the GBA market, wich is flooded by games making it hard for indies to compete with the marketing budgets and reseller connecitons of the big companies. But then off course one could probably strike a deal with some big game publisher to produce games based on some franchise for them on a freelance basis.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[ChrisM]

One point though: According to Elkware they're already trying to port "large PC games" to the mobile devices / cell phones. This will be hard for independent developers to compete with...

No it won't.  This goes back to a point I was making at the recent EU Telecom conference this month.  Porting PC games to mobile devices sucks.  Why? Not because gameplay can't be smooth, but because these devices are not DESIGNED to handle the same control/playability that a PC is.  

For example.  I DL'd Quake onto my Nokia 3650.  Great.  Whole level of Quake on my phone.  Took 80% of available storage memory and guess what?  Playing Quake on a phone sucks!  Great technical trick, bad device to play on.

Anyone try Age of Empires for PocketPC?  Looks awesome, plays like crap!

There are many great mobile games (check out Gameloft, one of the best in the business) that took PC games (Rayman, Prince of Persia, etc.) and scaled them appropriately for the phone.  Translation= they mads a plaform game for a mobile phone and just slapped the licensed property on it.

-ChrisM

[Preston]

No it won't.  This goes back to a point I was making at the recent EU Telecom conference this month.  Porting PC games to mobile devices sucks.  Why? Not because gameplay can't be smooth, but because these devices are not DESIGNED to handle the same control/playability that a PC is.

Chris, I agree with you. What I meant was: in case the big game names (brands) are sucessfull on mobile devices, smaller developers will hardly be able to compete with.
Larger companies will port brand PC titles to mobile devices - at least according to the the mentioned interview with Elkware's manager. He also said they're doing a conversion of "Anno 1503", a highly successfull and very complex PC game here in Europe. He also said such brands would have a good reputation even on the mobile market.

Btw. even if mobile devices aren't designed to handle "large" brand games you never know what people, the customers, will do. There's quite some irrationally behaviour "out there". ;-)

[kevglass]

Good-o, a topic to bring up a consideration I've been thinking about recently.

What is the predicted life of J2ME? Right now mobile devices (especially mobile phones) are pretty crap. The processor isn't up to much, the graphics are terrible and the device design themselfs are appauling.

However, the "next generation" of mobile devices is coming! (see the PSP) These devices have hardware comparable to lowend consoles. The generation afterwards (~3 years time?) will have what by todays standards is good hardware. Will we still want a cut down JVM for these platforms? Or we will just use a standard VM?

Kev

[cfmdobbie]

My guess - new devices will use a standard JVM, but J2ME will live on much longer than its expected lifetime.  Exactly how long I don't know - it depends whether Java progresses downwards into watches and Tamagotchi-like toys, IMHO.

Look at WAP - when it came out it was deemed the next big thing, and everyone rushed to get on the bandwagon.  One critical look at the system told you that it would be redundant within 18 months as portable devices would be powerful enough to handle normal HTML by then, and the drive towards XHTML was doing away with the need for a full SGML parser in any case.

But WAP is still very much around, more due to the number of legacy devices and the fact that it's now considered quite mature, than to any real technical merit.

Lots of new devices will support full JVMs, but there'll still be J2ME content out there.  There'll also be lots of devices around that are too old to handle a full JVM, so J2ME will still be the only way to deploy Java code to them.

Newer, less powerful devices on par with today's medium- to high-power devices will then be able to take up the J2ME banner.

YMMV, IMHO etc.

[endolf]

Hi
 WAP is a prime example of a bad idea from marketing to fill a problem. I've had a WAP enabled phone (well several) for about 3-4 years (something like that anyway), and I think in that time I've used it all of maybe 4 times. GPRS with my laptop on the other hand i've used frequently (at one time). I think i've tried the java games on my phone and been disapointed at them all, not so much the game, but the interface, one key down at a time just doesn't work. Part of the trouble is the screen resolution, we still don't have 'normal' web browsers on our phones even though we can have java games. I'm still not sure that a standard mobile (the small kind you use as a phone) will ever be a good target platform for games. I've never heard anyone say 'yeah, I was up till 6am playing bubble on my phone', maybe the handheld console with inbuilt phone type handsets will be worthy targets, but they will probably (by the time I ever finish writing any games) support opengl with a full JVM, and a keyboard/controller that you can use more than one key on at a time

Just my thoughts

Endolf

[Jeff]

http://www.javalobby.org/nl/archive/jlnews_20031111o.html

The Multi-BILLION Dollar Java Games Market!

I was pleasantly surprised to read of a new report from Analysys Research that predicts the Western European market for mobile games will grow more than 1000% from it's 2002 level of US$ 230 million to over US$ 3.4 BILLION by 2008!  

A few irascible comments.

(1) You all know the seer-sucker prinicple right?  At any given moment there are half a dozen people willing to pretend to be seers (see the future) and a few hundred suckers willing to listen.

(2) Anyone can draw a hockeystick.  try it, its fun!  All you do is keep adjusting the range of values and trying higher order derivatives til you get a nice looking line.  Its particualrly fallacious to take the % growth at the beginning of a market and extend it out into time.  500% growth of 1 is 5  Taking second or third order derivatives, which is what most hockey stick predictions are based on, exacerbates the error.

If future growth were predictable from past behaviors, we'd all be internet billionaires by now.

(3) Anyone gotten a reading on what the TOTAL game industry is expected to grow to by 2008? Im searching for an IGDA number now...