• 30Jul 05

  The Zodiac Killer

  Earlier this week, the Tapwave Zodiac experienced the pointy end of American capitalism first-hand. The slick, Palm-based PDA/multimedia device/gaming system--the pride of late 2003 and early 2004, when it won numerous design awards, including a rave review on WGR--was finally discontinued, after a year of twisting in the wind. The prospects of its creator aren't looking so great, either. Although there's no official news as of yet, Tapwave has retained Ueker and Associates to settle "any outstanding claim[s] with the company," according to the company's web site. Them's fightin' words, pardner.

  I, for one, really liked the Zodiac. I had only been in the office for a few months when a pair of Zodiacs arrived, prompting me to abandon my chief reviewing tool at the time--an LG VX6000--for the sexy, touch-sensitive newcomer. The device, shaped like a sheer, black hourglass, had shoulder buttons, Bluetooth, a gorgeous screen, and video acceleration, and it could run a decent polygonal version of Spy Hunter. It looked like a glorious alien artifact, and it played like hell on wheels, compared to the pokey mobile games I was used to. I wondered if it made any sense to cover the Zodiac next to downloadable mobile games...but then again, we were playing N-Gage games too, so why not? It was Wireless and it played Games, so we were going to Review it.

  

  On the other hand, there seemed to be a question for every bold statement the Zodiac made. Yes, the device won accolades for its tight design and broad feature set, but did that justify its sky-high price? The Zodiac 2, which came with a usable amount of internal memory, started retailing at about $400--well outside the budget of most gamers looking for a portable system. That fed into a larger question: where, exactly, could the Zodiac position itself? Tapwave secured a wide-ranging retail deal with a number of electronics chains, including CompUSA, but it never gained any traction in the video games sections of America's retail powerhouses, like Wal-Mart and Target--let alone game specialists such as Electronics Boutique. I bet that the vast majority of Zodiacs were sold right off of Tapwave's web site. The Zodiac's high price-point and lack of distribution insured that nobody bought one on a whim--only committed gadgeteers could be bothered to seek it out.

  Another major question concerned the very same feature set that the critics were raving about. It its core, the Zodiac was just an extra-fancy Palm OS PDA. After all, it was best navigated with a stylus, and it had no indigenous telephonic or WiFi capability. Even in 2004, the Golden Age of the PDA was a memory, given the increasing ubiquity of smart phones and microlaptops. It's midway through 2005, and many people are still saying that voice and TXT are mobile's killer apps--features that the Zodiac never supported. Once you threw in a shaky game catalog and a clunky online authentication scheme, a lot of the Zodiac's shine came off on your hands.

  Due to its poor positioning, the Zodiac had the misfortune of occupying the limbo between technological and portable games cycles. It included just enough expensive next-generation features, like Bluetooth and video acceleration, to make it a luxury good, but not a single revolutionary feature. The gaming aspect could have been that feature, but there simply weren't any games to get excited about. The Zodiac's biggest release, arguably, was a decent port of Doom II. Ring a ding ding. Meanwhile, the launch of the Nintendo DS was only a few quarters away, and Sony was busy engineering Zodiac-style screens into its alpha PSPs.

  It wasn't supposed to end like this. But then again, it never is.
  

  • Posted Jul 30, 2005 12:46 am PT
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• 25Jul 05

  Casualties!

  What's a casual game, anyway? Is it a game that everyone
  already knows how to play, like solitaire, chess and
  other "evergreen," public-domain pastimes? Or maybe it's
  a game that you have to learn, but has no action
  component in it. Or a laid-back game that doesn't involve
  competition, supposedly so non-gamers will enjoy it. Or a
  game that only uses a single button, or a game made
  specifically for older people and women (the casual sweet
  spot, according to demo graphic research), or some
  combination of the above.
  
  I've heard many competing definitions of casual gaming,
  and a lot of them actually seem to contradict each other.
  In an effort to find the truth, I decided to attend the Casual
  Games Conference in Bellevue earlier this week and
  consult the experts. It's common knowledge that the casual
  games industry and the mobile games industry have
  started to fuse into a single entertainment conglomerate,
  whose products are reaching new heights of informality
  even as they rake in billions of dollars. I wasn't sure what I
  was in for--vice presidents lounging around in flip-flops and
  cutoff jeans? Could I get away with having a pizza
  delivered in the middle of a session?
  
  Unsurprisingly, I found that the tone Casual Games
  Conference was very much in line with any of the
  multitude of mobile games conferences I regularly attend.
  
  It was like a much smaller CTIA, minus the telco nerdery
  and Michael Powell. I listened to a lot of talk about value
  chains, aggregation strategies, virtual communities, and
  commercial models. Like clockwork, every session
  eventually turned to a free-form discussion on the mobile
  games business, which started to sound like the casual
  games family's rich but highly unpredictable uncle. A
  flowchart appeared in my head: mobile games companies
  want casual games' genuinely interesting content (think
  Bejeweled, Zuma, Diner Dash, Hold 'em Poker, and so
  forth), and casual games companies want mobile
  customers, who have already been set up to spend by their
  carriers and given a little shove in the right direction.
  
  All of this made perfect sense. The prospect of deeper
  institutional links between casual games and mobile
  games is very exciting for both industries, because creating
  synergies between the two is easier than falling down a
  flight of stairs. In theory, casual games and mobile games
  are both manifestations of Internet-based entertainment,
  regardless of the terminal used to access the content.
  
  Microsoft is even building Xbox Live Arcade into their
  Xbox 360, for crying out loud. I played a rousing game of
  AstroPop on a demo Xbox at the show, and had a pretty
  good time doing it. It's not quite as easy as it should be
  just yet, but it almost certainly will be in a couple of years.
  
  But I still hadn't satisfied the real purpose of my visit, which
  was to ascertain the real meaning of the term "casual
  game." Unfortunately, nobody really had a logically
  consistent, parsimonious answer for me--not even casual
  games developers could really verbalize the entirety of the
  idea, because it's still in an unformed, liminal state. The
  landscape shifts depending on your point of view. Game
  developers would like to think that casual games are all
  about immediate accessibility, elegant design, and a
  rapid, addictive reward schedule--traits that most
  committed gamers appreciate. Most publishers, on the
  other hand, say that casual games are primarily intended
  for the widest possible spectrum of non-gamers, because
  gamers won't be entertained by them. One prominent
  casual games publisher told me that casual games should
  actually be called "popular games," because casual is a
  misnomer. He's right. At the conference, I found out that
  players of the successful casual game Puzzle Pirates spend
  three hours per day playing, on average. That's not casual
  play. If you know an Internet poker addict, you'll probably
  agree with me.
  
  In either case, the unspoken assumption that underpins the
  current, nebulous definition of casual gaming is that the
  console gaming audience can't enjoy games that aren't
  filled with violence and full motion video, paced at a
  breakneck speed, and filled with complex button
  commands. I think this is a tremendous fallacy, and a
  potentially tragic one for both the casual games and
  console games industries. The skill and technology barrier
  between casual and console games barely existed twenty
  years ago, and it need not be impermeable now--not if the
  right kinds of content are marketed correctly to the right
  kinds of people. Earlier this year, I couldn't get my mom to
  stop playing Katamari Damacy, which she thought was
  adorable. My 14-year-old cousin, on the other hand, owns
  every modern gaming console, and also happens to be
  addicted to certain high-quality mobile puzzle games. If
  they appeared on Xbox Live Arcade, he would buy them.
  There's room for a middle ground between casual and
  hard core, and that's where the future truly lies for all sorts
  of Internet games.
  
  • Posted Jul 25, 2005 7:55 pm PT
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• 16Jul 05

  The Clone Wars

  Many people in the mobile games business have acknowledged that mobile carrier decks are clogged with too many similar options, but how serious is this problem, exactly? Although I see many, many similar games pass through the decks over time from my vantage point, our review work focuses on individual games, so I don't usually try to get a holistic, instantaneous picture of the content that a consumer can download on a single phone at a particular time. So, this morning I'm wiping my mind clean of all mobile gaming knowledge (sodium pentathol seems to work pretty well) and venturing onto Verizon's LG VX7000 deck, like any number of prospective American mobile gamers would.

  Tabula rasa that I am, I can't seem to make heads or tails of the "fun and games" section of the deck, which is split into 11 distinct categories. The Featured Applications and Top Sellers categories are pretty straightforward--as are the TV/Movie Games, although it takes me about 20 button presses to scroll through all of them. How am I supposed to pick a game from the Sports section, though? There are six baseball games to choose from, five football games, and four basketball games, and many of these have their respective pro league's licenses. I'd need divine guidance to settle on a game in the Casino section, which offers no less than eight Texas Hold 'em products. Over in the Puzzle part of the deck, there are about a dozen games that involve the classic "Elimimatch" mechanic of matching like-colored blocks or balls, including Elimimatch itself!

  There are many reasons why shopping for a mobile game on today's decks is not a fulfilling consumer experience, and an equal number of culprits--I like Get It Now, and I certainly don't want to single Verizon out. But still, these massive gluts of functionally identical content confuse consumers and dilute the overall quality of mobile gaming. By "functionally identical content," I mean games that appear very similar to consumers before they buy them. In most markets, more types of competitive products are advantageous to the buyer, but not here. This is because the way carrier decks sell games tends to commoditize games that are not, in fact, comparable in quality, or even in price. For instance, how is J. Random Mobile Gamer supposed to know that "NFL Football 2005 by THQ" and "NFL 2005 by Jamdat" are radically different products? They could check out our reviews before buying, but what if they're not in a position to access our website or our on-deck mobile reviews--waiting for a bus with a Cingular phone in hand, for instance?

  No, we can safely assume that the majority of American mobile gamers buy straight off their phones, no questions asked. In my opinion, that means that mobile publishers, developers, and carriers need to do the asking for them, at least for now. Certain types of popular mobile games hit the decks in waves: there was a boomlet of bowling games a while back, followed sequentially by poker, golf, basketball, poker again, and mini-golf. Developers and publishers need to ask themselves whether following the leaders to market is a good use of their resources in every instance.

  By the same token, carriers should revisit their gaming plans. If they're so worried about letting customers wander around outside the walled garden, why are they letting so much stuff in? They should consider a wholesale culling of their decks--a mobile Clone Wars, if you will. I'm well aware that devs and pubs have a hard enough time getting their games to market as-is, but they must realize that the consumer doesn't know or care; they're looking for a reasonably-sized palette of attractive, unique games across a broad range of interests, not huge groups of generic games that are dumped onto the decks all at once. If we can start to deliver more of the former experience and less of the latter, our business will be better off in the long run.

  • Posted Jul 16, 2005 1:14 am PT
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