Spot On: Multiplayer for mobile gamers. Are we there yet?

Will multiplayer connectivity play a part in mobile gaming's future? Ask most developers and industry wags, and the answer is yes. If you think about it carefully, mobile's got nowhere to go that console and handheld gaming hasn't already been--nowhere but over a cellular GPRS network, that is, where cumbersome ground-based entertainment devices have little economic incentive to follow. Of course, there's many a step between the idea and the phone. For every mobile maven that claims that networked multiplayer is where mobile gaming must direct its energies, there are another two that point to the prohibitive costs, technical barriers, and unacceptable risks that currently stand between wide-spectrum multiplayer and reality.

Two companies that specialize in mobile multiplayer systems design, Atlas Mobile and Kayak Interactive, are stepping into the breach with business models and technology that might turn handset-bound games into multiplayer funfests. Both companies have developed their own set of multiplayer solutions, which can be applied to either existing games or integrated into new titles during the development process; and each has its own distinct business strategy.

Atlas Mobile is best known for its Tournaments for Prizes series of games, including Hold 'em Poker+ for Prizes (shown above), Tetris Tournament for Prizes, and QBz for Prizes. Although Atlas is relatively new to the mobile scene, these games have already generated millions of two-player tournaments on Verizon Wireless, and Atlas has doled out thousands of prizes to victorious competitors. Atlas Mobile's multiplayer games involve skills-based, indirect competition. Its games score opposing players on how well they can make lines disappear in Tetris or how well they can eliminate groups in QBz. Basically, the game compares numbers at the end of a match to determine a winner. This system is then coupled to a front-end template to create a very consistent feel throughout the Atlas Mobile game lineup. "We've got a client framework that we've deployed across eight titles so far, featuring a standard user interface and a prize delivery system. We want people to immediately associate that framework with Atlas Mobile," CEO Isaac Babbs said.

Babbs and chief technology officer and VP of product development Andy Riedel also detailed Atlas Mobile's standard four-step process for bringing a particular game in to the tournament family. First comes the design document, where Atlas' team considers how to make the game into a fair, skills-based tournament so it will comply with state and federal regulations. Next, Atlas Mobile returns to the game property's owner with its feedback, cooperating with the owner to lay out the tournament version of the game. Third, Atlas creates a client framework and server platform for the new game. Finally, Atlas engineers begin re-coding the game to add multiplayer functionality. Atlas Mobile has also cooked up its own software development kit for clients who prefer to go elsewhere for development purposes, said Babbs.

According to Babbs and Riedel, Atlas Mobile created the indirect tournament format to introduce mobile multiplayer to the marketplace in a slow, sustainable fashion--and also to circumvent many of the technical barriers and data transfer problems that still plague the industry. "We have real-time multiplayer technology that we're going to start rolling out later this year, but we decided to take a step back, at first, mainly for the mobile gamer's sake. We personally felt that the experience wasn't quite compelling enough to move to mobile yet, mostly due to device limitations and high data costs to the consumer. On many of today's networks, even a simple chess game could hit you for half an hour of airtime--and that's if you manage to make it through without the other player getting fed up and dropping or going into a tunnel and losing reception," explained Babbs. In addition, Atlas believes that many of the communications features that make the real-time multiplayer experience worthwhile on other gaming systems simply aren't possible yet over a cell network. "The social element is really integral to multiplayer," added Riedel, "but we can't really do chat, voice chat, or video conferencing on mobile right now."

There's a common theme to Atlas Mobile's choice of titles as well. Babbs and company have generally applied their tournament system to simple, intuitive games that many players are already familiar with in one guise or another. "Multiplayer isn't compelling all by itself. Content is the real key, and we ask a lot of questions before we'll tournament-enable a game. Is it easy to play? Is it fun? Will people keep coming back to it? Does it fit the two- to ten-minute gaming experience model? We're not trying to do The Sims or involved turn-based games right now. Intrinsically, we don't think that most people are going to sit down for hours at a time to play a phone RPG at the present time. We're not after the 20 percent of the market that consider themselves 'hardcore gamers,'" said Babbs.

Although there's no such statistic available for the percentage of Atlas Mobile's gamers who play purely for the opportunity to win prizes, such as the Best Buy coupons and Gamefly accounts offered by Atlas, Babbs is a believer, likening his company's strategy to creating a Game Show Network for phones. "We think that prizing is a pretty unique situation for us, though we may not stick with it forever. You're going to be seeing more sponsors and bigger brands in the future, and we're trying to increase the quantity of prizes so that more players can win." Babbs told us that a new relationship with New Line Cinema is in the works for this summer, and Riedel mentioned that Atlas is working on an in-game messaging system so consumers could more easily indicate which prizes they'd like to compete for.

Kayak Interactive's multiplayer model is entirely different from that used in Atlas Mobile's existing body of work. Technological and market barriers notwithstanding, they've already plunged into so-called "interactive" multiplayer, which, in the mobile space, isn't necessarily the same thing as real-time multiplayer. Interactive multiplayer titles allow players to see their opponents' moves so that they can react appropriately, usually in a turn-based format. This represents quite a departure from Atlas Mobile's opaque competitive model. At the same time, Kayak's business lies more exclusively with a particular game's technological back end, meaning that its final product is more or less transparent to the end user. Therefore, an Atlas Mobile-style line of integrated titles isn't really part of its strategy. In a recent e-mail interview, Faigen described his company's function "as a multiplayer realization consultant." According to Kayak's senior VP of marketing and sales George Faigen, "Multiplayer games add another level of effort for the game developer. We've compensated for the complexities of networking, performing group communication, state recovery (when failures occur), and carrier system integration by building a system of APIs that are accessible to game developers. We also provide them [with] test facilities and knowledgeable application engineers who work with them in multiplayer game architecture and implementation."

The first mobile game to use Kayak's interactive multiplayer technology is a game titled Pub Pool Online (which Faigen said will likely be known as Major League Pool in North America), the multiplayer version of the successful original from British developer Iomo. According to Kayak managing director John Chasey, who is currently working with Kayak to bring Pub Pool Online live, it made a lot of sense from Iomo's standpoint. According to Chasey, "While we had already implemented a two-player hot-seat mode in the game, Kayak led the direction of the server-side and back-end technology/integration, and we concentrated on the client-side and user interface for Pub Pool Online." Chasey added, "...the amount of work required to implement multiplayer properly--not just adding high-score upload--shouldn't be underestimated. We felt that since there were many multiplayer technologies on the market already, it would be better to spend our time creating the best multiplayer experience within our games, rather than spending a huge amount of resources re-creating back-end technologies." By way of illustration, Chasey told us that Pub Pool Online actually took longer to implement than developing the original game--even with Kayak's help.

This is no surprise given the litany of technical issues Kayak and Iomo had to confront to get Pub Pool Online up and running. Faigen's synopsis of Kayak's Pub Pool Online task list elucidated the high-level thinking necessary to make mobile multiplayer work. "To ensure that each game progressed, we decided to limit a turn's duration and the duration of any given game," said Faigen, who added, "This introduced an acute need for failure handling, as the timed-turn construct had to handle both network and player lapses--and ensure that a dropped player could, upon reconnecting, synchronize the game. To solve these problems, we retained the history of shots and exposed the game state to the Kayak platform." All of this work paid off at Kayak and Iomo's promotional Pub Pool Online tournament at this year's Game Developers Conference.

Kayak wouldn't be staking so much on multiplayer if the business side of the equation didn't add up as well. "Multiplayer may become so popular that most games [will] come with both single-player and multiplayer modes as standard issue," predicted Faigen. "We put ourselves into the minds of the mobile phone subscriber. She/he has purchased a phone for voice and then has purchased aftermarket entertainment, such as ringtones, voicemail messages, and games. If you ask these phone subscribers, 'How would you describe Monopoly?', they answer with terms such as 'board game' and 'lots of fun'--not, 'It's a multiplayer game.' Additionally, when you ask them where they would buy such a game, they answer, 'In a toy store.', not 'In the multiplayer aisle of the game store.' Long answer shortened, we believe that multiplayer will be a major force in mobile gaming. Multiplayer will engage a wider range of consumers, and, as such, it will increase the number of game players and therefore the revenues generated by mobile games."

Faigen and Kayak are in agreement with Atlas Mobile in that multiplayer functionality must be selective given today's technological conditions. "Not all games should be extended to multiplayer. And not all multiplayer games should be done on today's mobile phones, given user interface challenges and the latency of the network that joins the players. Real-time games, such as head-to-head racing, are not a good design over today's 2.5G networks," explained Faigen. In any case, Kayak Interactive plans to have 10 multiplayer releases in the US by the end of this year.

A number of more-established mobile developers and publishers have created in-house infrastructures for granting their games multiplayer functionality. Witness Jamdat's Bejeweled Multiplayer and Bowling 2, Macrospace's Cannons Tournament, Summus' Phil Hellmuth's Texas Hold 'Em, or Sorrent's upcoming five-card-draw poker title. One need only consider those games, as well as other news, to understand that multiplayer is a rapidly growing segment of the already hot mobile market. In fact, Nokia has committed huge resources to promote its N-Gage Arena and is planning to make the multiplayer experience even more integral to the N-Gage with Arena Launcher and titles like Pocket Kingdom and Pathway to Glory. Furthermore, Ideaworks3D (long established in N-Gage circles) announced a partnership several months ago with Digital Bridges to bring its Airplay 2.0 multiplayer framework to mobile games on Nokia's Series 60 handsets.

Though their business plans and philosophies of design may be different (so different, in fact, that the two companies are really only partial competitors at this stage), Atlas Mobile and Kayak Interactive are making it their business to fill in the multiplayer gaps for large and small developers alike, and they're driving mobile multiplayer's market penetration forward at the same time. Nobody can predict for sure when high-speed networking and next-gen handsets are going to touch down in North America, but these two companies aren't waiting. Atlas Mobile recently announced a deal with Namco to tournament-enable Ms. Pac-Man, and Kayak Interactive worked with developer Floodgate to publish a demonstration of Swashbuckler--an incomplete but interesting massively multiplayer pirate sim that showed off Kayak's multiplayer tech--at BREW 2004.

Massively multiplayer gaming is slowly coming to the mobile beat, with Atlas and Kayak part of the pack of companies intent on delivering an experience that will set their business models apart from the rest--as well as advance the entire sector.