Presented by Tommy Palm - Jadestone Elina M.I. Koivista - Nokia
While being limited technically and unable to support direct ports of most traditional MMOG games, the mobile platforms offers many advantages for supporting a massively multiplayer online game market.
The greatest benefit of the mobile market is the preexisting and growing install base. When one talks about developing a new AAA console title, one speaks in terms of millions of target consumers and an overall install base in the tens of millions. The mobile market measures it's install base in the hundreds of millions, set to pass the 1 billion mark sometime soon.
Mobile phones also offer a wholly different kind of connection to the game that is uniquely suited to MMOGs. While PC and console based MMOGs/MMORPGs are played in fixed sessions lasting hours, mobile phones are with the player all the time. This is further reinforced by the unique 2 way connection - game information can be pushed at the player. So rather then the characters avatar being an occasional visitor to the online world, they are able to act as a full time resident.
The mobile platform also brings a number of challenges however. The number one challenge is latency. Average latency can be over 500ms, and in addition mobile connections suffer from frequent bursts, accounting for about 1% of all packets sent, of extremely long duration lag, where a message could take over 10 seconds to arrive. Mobile phones also suffer from unexpected lost connections like when passing through a tunnel. Games need to work around this so that a dropped connection is not reason to punish the player.
The cost of the traffic itself also poses a challenge. Most mobile users are charged per byte to send and receive data. A mobile MMOG needs to limit the data sent to a minimum to avoid making the net cost of playing the game too expensive to justify.
The amount of available screen space also poses a challenge to presenting a MMOG world - the player should feel they are interacting with many other players, yet the confines of the screen can easily make it feel like a single player experience. Even placing a chat window can use a large amount of screen space, and still not be large enough to give the player time to read messages as they scroll by.
Content and code is the last major hurdle. Mobile platforms are still very memory limited, so presenting a large world either requires extensive reuse of art and data, or server side storage, which results in increased data being sent to the player. While game resources can be stored as records or server side, allowing for easy updates, the code can be difficult to update to add new features or fix bugs. Typically J2ME games cannot have individual resources patched, they must be downloaded as a complete package, often manually. The effect of this can be lessened by implementing both mandatory and non-mandatory patches, giving the users the option of remaining with a earlier version if the new one only fixes 1 bug.
There are several gameplay mechanics that work well on the mobile platform and can help work around the previously mentioned hurdles.
Unite 2010
