According to a November 2004 report from telecom consultancy Analysys, games have taken over from personalization services as a key driver of growth in mobile-content revenues. Games now constitute the third-largest content category, accounting for 21 percent of total revenue. And the same report goes on to show how strong gaming growth over the next five years will be driven by the increased penetration of downloadable Java-based games. Previously, most mobile games resided on client servers accessed through WAP or SMS, which limited their functionality. Now, thanks to the Java MIDP standard, games can actually be downloaded to, and run from, users' handsets. This allows for the development of games that exploit the advanced user interfaces, color displays and high resolution of today's mobile phones. Games offering better sound, sharper graphics and vibrations are now commonplace.

Both developers and operators are therefore shifting their focus to downloadable games, which offer far more revenue potential than those played over WAP or SMS. According to Analysys, the prices of mobile games are actually rising in many cases, yet players seem prepared to pay to download these more advanced games to their color handsets. And operators perceive the premium value of a game download to be much higher than the traffic value of a WAP or SMS game.

 

As mobile games advance, so too do the companies developing them. Magnus Wester, a business and partner manager at Ericsson Mobility World, says that many game developers are now starting to enjoy sustained growth. "About two years back most of these companies were small, venture-capital-funded enterprises. Now, many are showing solid profits and have started to take on more employees," Wester says.

 

In the interests of pushing the mobile gaming industry further forward, Ericsson Mobility World has partnered with a number of developers. One of these is Swedish company Terraplay, which has created a network solution enabling real-time, multi-player gaming. Another is Synergenix, also a Swedish company, which offers a wide portfolio of cross-technology mobile games.

 

Ericsson also has a distribution agreement with a content provider called MaxArtists for their game Aces High. In addition, as part of its Managed Content & Application offering, Ericsson will provide hosted gaming solutions based on the Unipier platform. This will allow Ericsson's customers to facilitate the formation of multi-player, mobile-gaming communities.

 

Despite such developments, lack of standardization is still preventing the industry from reaching its full potential. One of the biggest problems, according to Wester, is that the Java standard is very open to interpretation, and handset manufacturers themselves dictate which Java classes are implemented in their models. "What this means, in practice, is that game developers have to change the software of a given game for each handset in which it is installed. Developers may have to customize their games for many different devices, which increases development costs and lengthens time to market," says Wester.

 

Visit the Ericsson Mobility World homepage here.