PS Vita keeps mobile gaming, PS3 connectivity at heart of US push

As the PlayStation Vita readies its big release here in the United States, we’ve got more than enough reason to want to pick one up and not stop playing for days on end. And as the advertising world begins to size up the situation, they’ve decided to target the gamers amongst use with a tendency to not stop playing unless they must. PlayStation Vita is a gaming system that’ll allow you to play your PlayStation 3 games at home, convert your save to your PS Vita machine, continue to play, and play again when you’re back to your system – there’s no need to play outside every again!


For it’s truly the everywhere gaming model that Sony is latching onto here, with gamers that want an unending stream of games at their fingertips at the heart of it all. It’s not just gaming on the go that these players desire, Sony has decided, its inexpensive gaming, games that can be downloaded and accessed anywhere, all the greatness of the mobile world that’s been missing in the hardware world. Smartphones and tablets are the opponents of the PS Vita, so says Sony.
The folks at Interpublic Group of Companies group Deutsch’s executive vice president and creative director, mister Jason Elm, spoke with the NYTimes about the campaign they’d whipped up for the current continuation of the worldwide release of the PS Vita. He’s got no qualms with wanting the gamers of the earth to plug in and tune out:

“[This campaign's audience is] very socially plugged in, mobile, out and about, both physically and on the Internet. Gaming is no longer playing alone in a basement by one person with one machine; it’s all networked.” – Elm

The operating system on the device has been suggested as being a viable candidate for additional wireless-data-connected devices as well, with Yoshio Matsumoto, Director of Business and Sony Computer Entertainment SVP, speaking on how this device is just the thin edge of the wedge:

“[Translated:] I’d like to point out that I mentioned the first thing Vita is is a hardware that provides digital entertainment only, and there there is the Vita OS which at the moment is just the OS made to provide it. The OS will continue to provide entertainment of all kinds, and though it’s made here to provide for a portable machine the best gaming experience for game enthusiasts, this is the thing edge of the wedge first.” – Matsumoto

So what we’ve got here is the successes of the mobile world in a smartphone-esque operating system running on a fully PlayStation 3 connected handheld gaming powerhouse. It’s as if it couldn’t possibly fail, yes? We’ll see how the PS Vita fares here in the USA after it’s been out for an extended period – soon!
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Mobile Game Development

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Mobile Gaming, In-app Purchases on the Rise as Tablet, Smartphone Adoption Surges: Study Read more

Increasing popularity of tablets and Smartphones have led to a surge in mobile game downloads along with in-app purchases if findings of a recent report published by Park Associates are to be believed.
According to the study in last three years the percentage of gamers in US who tend to download games onto their mobile devices has risen from 7 per cent in 2008 to eighteen per cent in 2011. In addition, gaming applications seem to significantly contribute to the earnings of Facebook games.

Amongst tablet users, the number of people playing games for at least an hour in a month stood at 71 per cent for adults while the same in case of teenagers stood at 79 per cent. With improved versions of tablets like iPad2 hitting the market, the choice of games for this genre is likely to grow in near future and quite expectedly game publishers are looking to introduce more complex and engaging game titles specifically tailored towards such devices.

The report stressed on the fact that in-app purchases are changing the way gaming industry can look to monetise their products in coming days. Explaining the rationale behind the view, Pietro Macchiarella from Park Associates mentioned "In-app purchases greatly expand monetization of the free-to-play model, thanks to seamless payments. Already, most of the top grossing games on iTunes and Android can be downloaded for free and generate the majority of their revenues via virtual purchases."

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Tencent mobile game platform hits 200M users

Chinese social giant Tencent now has 200-million registered users on its mobile gaming platform Mobile QQ Game Hall.

Accroding to Marbridge Consulting, the Shenzen-based tech companysome 13-million of those users log onto the platform on a daily basis. At times there are up to a million people on the network at the same time.
A large part of Mobile QQ Game’s success comes from the fact that it caters for China’s largely fragmented mobile ecosystem. Users can access Symbian, KJava, Android, iOS, Windows Phone 7, and HTML 5 versions of the platform.

The most notweworthy thing about those numbers, however, is the fact that the platform only offers “several dozen casual games” at present.

A large proportion of those games are casual card and board games such as Dou Dizhu, Chinese chess, and Tetris.

One thing in Tencent’s favour, however, is that it has linked Mobile QQ Games to its weibo service for the Symbian and Android clients, which has over 250-million users.

For some perspective on just how impressive the numbers coming out Tencent are, it’s worth taking a look at the ones from Facebook.

After all, the world’s most popular social network recently announced that it would undertake a massive push in the mobile social gaming arena.

At the moment it has around 60-million people interacting with its apps. Bear in mind that those apps cover a number of areas outside the social gaming space (although Zynga accounts for around 19% of its revenue) and you get a glimpse of just how far ahead China’s web space really is.

TheNextWeb reports, however, that Mobile QQ games may soon have a significant rival in the space.
Japanese platforms DeNA and GREE — both multimillion dollar companies in their own right — are already active in the Chinese market. The latter, meanwhile, recently greed a deal to bring its platform to Baidu Yi
devices, building on a similar deal with Alibaba to take its gaming platform to Aliyun OS devices.

Tencent has one of the largest social portfolios in the world. Aside from its weibo, its properties include the massively popular QQ instant messaging service, which is the world’s largest online community.
Emerging markets media giant Naspers has a stake in the company.

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Mobile Super Bowl Apps Score With Football Fans

This year, getting ready for the Super Bowl includes more than putting on your team’s colors and buying lots of chips and dip. Now, football fans are doing something else in preparation for the big game: downloading mobile super bowl apps!

According to Mobile Marketer, Shazam, is a mobile app that many football fans will be downloading. Shazam is an app that captures music, gives you information about songs, and lets you buy songs directly. Mobile Marketer says, “With Shazam’s 175 million users, marketers can assume a significant overlap with their customers. So it makes sense that one-third of the Super Bowl ads on Sunday, Feb. 5 will be Shazamable.”
The article went on to say, “Consumers who use the Shazam app to capture audio from these commercials will be able to enter sweepstakes for major prizes, view special content, and receive free music. The results are impressive: Shazam-enabled ads are claimed to deliver 350 percent higher engagement over ads whose only call to action is “Follow us.”

In addition to all the football fans downloading Shazam, they’ll also be downloading the Chevy Game Time app that gives users a chance to win free prizes (including Chevy vehicles) by answering trivia and questions during the game.

Mobile Marketer says, “The Adbowl 2012 mobile app lets you vote [on your favorite Super Bowl commercials] and view results from the comfort of your couch. Will it be Geico’s gecko or Kia’s hamster? The nation awaits the results.”

PepsiCo is also encouraging mobile check-ins with social TV and user interaction during Super Bowl XLVI using the aforementioned Shazam. Notes Mobile Marketer, “The brand’s TV commercials are focused around Pepsi’s sponsorship and work with Fox’s The X Factor show. The ads will feature a Shazam logo in the bottom corner of the screen that users can snap with the Shazam app. Viewers who use the Shazam app can watch a music video during the show.”

“Pepsi is also using GetGlue to interact with users during the Super Bowl game. Users who check-in to the game can access additional content and receive coupons for buy-one-get-one-free Pepsi products.”
The Coke polar bears will be reacting to game plays and Super Bowl commercials in real-time on the company’s micro-site. Fans can visit Coke’s Facebook page to RSVP for their mobile-friendly Coke Polar Bowl.

I spoke with Bryan Laurienti, co-owner of BBB Systems and he said, “The Super Bowl is already a very social event, so adding mobile technology into the mix presents brands with an exciting opportunity. They’ll be able to reach more users by word of mouth and they’ll see a big jump of pre and mid-game mobile app downloads thanks to social sharing.”

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iOS Game Design This Home Lets You Construct And Create Your Dream Abode

Design This Home, the latest game title from iOS mobile game development studio App Minis, is debuting as a new way to add gaming elements to designing your dream house, keeping your residents happy, and completing tasks. As App Minis founder Alex Ahlund explains, “Think The Sims with a greater emphasis on home decor and design.”

Design This Home, which is currently available for download in the App Store, allows you choose from a number of architectural styles of homes including modern, traditional, country, Southwestern, European, Asian, and Victorian. You then have nine different rooms to decorate and can customize every element of your home such as arranging furniture, putting up cabinets, painting the walls, renovating the floors and more. As you complete more tasks, you increase your home’s value and collect more income from your residents.
At launch, the game includes 500 items of customization. Ahlund says the studio places a heavy focus on visual design in crafting the graphic rich and animated 2D iOS title.

You may remember Ahlund from his former company, mobile app directory AppVee, which was sold to Appolicious in 2010. A former video game designer, Ahlund decided to go back to his roots to launch an iOS game development studio. The studio’s current offering of games have 7 million downloads in total. The startup itself is composed of former employees from Electronic Arts, Atari, PlayFirst, Floodgate and Google.

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The game within the game: Making mobile gaming work for developers and consumers

2011 was a banner year for mobile gaming. We’re now seeing 60 percent of smartphone users regularly playing games on their devices and surveys indicate that number will only increase. That’s a remarkable achievement considering only 18 percent of gamers played on mobile devices in 2009.

Mobile game development has also transitioned, from niche hobby to lucrative profession. While developers continue to push the boundaries of mobile gaming, the industry must consider the business imperatives affecting the evolution of this dynamic marketplace. As it does so, companies will have to address three distinct challenges:

Console vs. mobile

Technology hurdles that once prevented mobile gaming from rivaling console gaming are gone. Battery life, formerly a huge hurdle for mobile devices, is less of an issue now, although there will always be trade-offs around how and where the best gaming experiences are delivered. Advanced mobile technologies are offering better power performance for longer play as well as new innovations, all of which can match the console online experience. This raises the question of whether the next-generation gamer will need to buy a dedicated gaming machine at all, if their mobile devices can match the console experience.

At the same time, visionary companies are taking mobile gaming to uncharted places. Take vision-based augmented reality (AR), which superimposes 3D graphics on real world objects and landscapes to create immersive 3D games that combine real and virtual worlds. The mobile technology in this area is advancing and bringing brand new gaming experiences to life. Imagine the camera in your smartphone being able to recognize the objects you see and provide information in real time that would be useful to you as you moved around. Companies doing research in AR for mobile are working on the technologies to make that possible — and it’s something that you can’t do at all in the traditional console world.

The LTE revolution

Next-generation 4G networks are winning points with consumers as game developers harness bigger, faster pipelines in new and creative ways. The industry-leading 4G standard is now Long Term Evolution, or LTE, and it’s enabling a whole new kind of mobile game.

For example, Gameloft (a Qualcomm partner) will soon release Modern Combat 3, an exclusive game that is one of the first massively multiplayer on-line (MMO) mobile games to take advantage of LTE’s bandwidth and low latency. LTE opens the door to MMO games for more powerful mobile gaming experiences. That’s exciting for the millions of players seeking to replicate the intensity of online console gaming on their mobile devices.

LTE’s main game development challenge is production expense: It costs more to make an LTE game, with its richer graphics and larger amounts of data, than a game meant for a lower-bandwidth connection. While LTE is quickly expanding in the U.S., it needs broader penetration to become a profitable and viable option. Until then, games made for LTE will be slow in coming to market, especially from smaller game developers.

The solution? An ongoing commitment from the mobile industry to double down on proliferating LTE on a global scale. As the networks become universal and more LTE-enabled devices come to market, it will make economic sense for developers to commit to the technological investment. Mobile enablers and carriers can help set the table for their game developer partners and bring more LTE games to life by driving LTE access and adoption.

Getting graphic

Mobile graphics innovation is at an all-time high. Enhanced graphics processing units (GPUs) make it possible for consumers to enjoy immersive gaming experiences on mobile devices that were previously only possible on consoles or desktop PCs.

Many developers have started to enhance their games with the addition of new location-aware and social features, as well as optimizations to enable higher performance when running on mobile devices. However, this is still far from the norm. Business realities often necessitate optimizing games for the capabilities of lowest common denominator hardware, resulting in a less impressive user experience for a wider audience. Managing that balancing act is a challenge for any developer.

Chipset companies and manufacturers must work with middleware and game engine vendors to bring an increased supply of optimized implementations to mobile platforms. By offering developers the best of both worlds, we’ll progress toward an ecosystem where the optimal gaming experience — one that takes full advantage of the GPU — is possible on the majority of mobile devices.

A whole new world

The future is bright. We’re on the verge of mobile experiences that previously only seemed possible if Captain Kirk and Spock were prominently involved.

Creating the best possible gaming experience across wireless platforms is the only way to equal (and potentially surpass) console gaming while spurring innovation within the mobile industry. But we can only get there by thinking bigger. That means increasing the ratio of games fully optimized for the capabilities provided by modern mobile hardware.

If we’re to make AR and LTE gaming an everyday reality, we must begin by embracing and taking full advantage of the incredible developments made over the past couple years. It’s a daunting challenge, but it’s one we can take on together. Game on!

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DeNA, NetDragon form new Chinese localizing social games studio

Chinese online/mobile game developer and operator NetDragon revealed today that it is set to form a new social games studio with Tokyo-based social and mobile gaming giant DeNA, with the aim to develop mobile social games for the Chinese market.

The two companies will form the new studio in the first quarter of 2012, with paid-in starting funds of $6 million, and initial staff numbers of around 30.

The new studio will be looking to localize non-Chinese social smartphone games for the region, including a number of DeNA's own in-house titles, and some third-party titles.

These localized games will then be operated through DeNA's Mobage network in China, and be made available via NetDragon's digital distribution platforms.

Looking to the future, the studio also plans to develop original in-house titles, with a focus on MMORPG titles for mobile gamers around the world.

"The joint venture will allow DeNA to leverage NetDragon Group's capability in developing and operating Chinese games, its proven business management experience in China, as well as NetDragon's highly popular mobile app store," the companies said in a joint statement.

NetDragon and DeNA first announced a joint partnership back in April of last year, when they revealed they would be sharing mobile game development resources and distribution platforms with each other.

 

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