Steve Palley Associate Editor, Mobile

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A Formal Invitation

Perhaps a better title for this column would have been...ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGH!!!! If you're wondering what the sound of one mobile gaming editor fuming may be, there you have it. There's nothing particularly metaphysical about bloodcurdling frustration.

I said: ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGH!!!!

I've always been quick to extol the virtues of mobile games. I still believe that these little downloadable pastimes constitute a brave new frontier for developers, consumers, and gaming aficionados alike. I've said it many times before: The potential for mobile games is almost limitless, given the continuously accelerating rate of technological uptake in cellular phones--and the huge pool of consumers (numbering into the hundreds of millions presently, and soon to crack the billion mark) willing to spend money on good games.

Good, great, and best. But for this process to function smoothly, so that consumers can identify which games they want, purchase them in a convenient fashion, and start turning their Nokias, Samsungs, and LGs into the highly touted next-generation entertainment devices mobile guys like me are always talking about, there's an industry's worth of work that needs to get done behind the scenes. At the moment, said work is sadly incomplete, and I'm beginning to think that many of those that hold the reins in the mobile gaming business have no real incentive to rectify the situation.

Allow me to specify. In the US, mobile games are primarily sold in downloadable format, meaning that they have no corporeal product to deliver. In most cases, therefore, there is no substantive information about a game readily available at the point of sale, other than its title and perhaps a two- or three-sentence blurb buried in a menu somewhere. If you're buying an Xbox game from, say, Best Buy, you'll be able to at least look at the back of the box to view some screenshots, a paragraph or two of marketing, or maybe even some quotes from a review.

The game you wind up buying may very well be awful, but at least it has been marketed and distributed according to a consistent standard. More importantly, GameSpot and its competitors will have received all of the necessary assets, information, and preview and review materials well in advance of its release--meaning that the review of a particular game will be available as soon as the game is on sale, or very soon thereafter. You will have the opportunity to read expert evaluations of a particular console game before many people have had a chance to spend their money on it.

This is not yet the case in the mobile gaming business, where consumers do not usually have the information they need to make informed buying decisions. Hence, my use of the term "business," rather than "market." A strong correlation between quality and success is integral to the creation and sustained growth of a market, and I'm not certain mobile games have demonstrated this link. Part of this is certainly our responsibility; simply put, we (the critics) collectively need to do a better job of getting on top of new games as they come out. WGR pioneered the mobile gaming review process (we were also the first to put our reviews on Sprint and Verizon handsets, so that mobile consumers could have a better idea of what they were buying in a more immediate fashion), and now GameSpot Mobile is carrying the torch to a new range of consumers. However, like it or not, our progress toward our goal of reviewing every mobile game released in the US will proceed at a snail's pace without the cooperation of mobile developers, publishers, and carriers.

As matters currently stand, few mobile developers are capable of telling us with any degree of certainty when their games will be available for purchase, let alone where the consumer will be able to get them. If we lack even this elementary information, imagine how difficult it is to get screenshots as well as other assets and review materials on a timely basis. Simply put, mobile games creators have never really needed to concern themselves with marshaling and disseminating these resources in a proactive fashion--and although they've made great strides in this department recently, there is still no standardized, cross-industry methodology, as console and PC games have enjoyed for years. The more time we spend trying to figure out where we can get screens or clarifying cross-handset issues for a game, the less time we have to review.

Admittedly, much of this confusion has been generated by deep-seated structural issues that developers and publishers cannot begin to fix by themselves. The most fundamental issue is the handset problem: There are a huge variety of handsets currently for sale and already in circulation, few of which have similar gaming capabilities. Game makers must frequently develop a number of versions of the same game, which can change each game's feature set, the presence of sound effects, the number of playable levels, or whether a game will even run at a playable speed, so that the versions will be nothing alike. Technically speaking, the mobile "platform" is really more of a cosmology, with different versions of a product being released at different times on different carriers. The second barrier to cohesion are the carriers themselves, which hold ultimate control over which games are released on their download decks at what times--and in what relative position. A particular carrier's release schedule is closely held proprietary information; the carrier may choose to push a game to the top of its download deck if it believes that it will boost mobile data revenues, regardless of the game's quality. There's no doubt that carriers are concerned by the long-term implications of alienating the mobile consumer base with poor content. However, in the short term, these carriers must continue to demonstrate that mobile gaming is a feasible part of their overall data strategy, which in turn fuels the expansion of their next-generation networks.

Will you buy my mobile data products now? Good!

But not all of the problems stem from these essentially uncontrollable circumstances. Some of it is based purely upon the bottom line. It's troubling to see mobile developers and publishers base their entire production strategies upon the distributional weaknesses and informality of the mobile platform. I can think of countless examples of games that were created (and named, more properly) to tempt consumers from their spots on the mobile download deck; after all, there's no facile way to return a mobile game once it has been purchased. Punishing this kind of disingenuous production is one of gaming journalism's primary functions--but I believe that some developers and publishers would rather we not review their products at all, and they are therefore more than content to let us do the job on our own.

I don't want to suggest that mobile exists to purely make a quick buck--the preponderance of evidence suggests that most mobile developers and publishers are working in earnest to produce good games, and they would be thrilled to cooperate with journalists to the point of drowning them in assets. After all, mobile is a brand-new business and we need to make allowances for the lack of resources and experience that has inhibited this exchange until now.

But that's not going to stop me from urging mobile game makers to formalize mobile gaming; competition shouldn't prevent them from getting together and helping to create an industry out of a business. If every mobile developer and publisher were to join a loose consortium, they could begin hashing out a standardized way to promote mobile games--possibly starting with a release calendar, for instance. Such an organization could help to put content makers on more of an equal footing with handset manufacturers and mobile carriers politically, too. Mobile gaming has too much potential to devolve into a jumbled, state-of-nature advertising vector, but a little foresight would make for a nice insurance policy.