The PocketGamer.biz Mobile Mavens is our panel of experts drawn from all sectors of the mobile gaming industry.
Though the promise of this year's E3 being mobile's first big splash at the expo arguably never materialised, but Microsoft's unveiling of Xbox SmartGlassmeant smartphones had a very prominent seat at the table during the firm's Xbox 360 conference.
And so, we asked the Mavens:
Putting the tech itself aside, does Xbox SmartGlass suggest Microsoft is looking to further merge its mobile and console offerings, and what will this mean for developers if this is the case?
Ultimately the technologies have to merge or the console will get bypassed completely - see my opinions on the last Mavens question. Yet, I don't think this is the way that it will happen with SmartGlass as Microsoft is still gatekeeping its platform.
Mobile and social's successes are only partly about the technology, it's the digital economies that go with them. That's the real threat that Microsoft should address.
Regardless of that - as a creative - I could see there being some great uses. Especially if I can be playing part of the game as an app whilst I'm out and then link it up - like a modern day Dreamcast VMU (visual memory unit), but with battery life of longer than an hour.
Microsoft doesn't play an important role for mobile game devs yet.
John is co-founder of PR and marketing company Big Ideas Machine. Also an all-round nice guy...
The concept around SmartGlass is a great one - the idea of being able to create a dual yet synchronised games experience is something that I've been talking about since 2000, when ARM first started thinking about where mobile gaming would go.
However, I think there are too many barriers in the way of this becoming anything more than a tech demo product. It seems certain to create greater code and device fragmentation, and I can only see developers with very deep pockets even wanting to consider this.
Maybe it's more attractive to console companies: when you consider the huge numbers of people who have signed up for Call of Duty Elite on their phones, you can see that in certain cases it's a great way to extend a gaming experience. But that's an extreme case of a publisher with an insanely popular franchise and plenty of cash.
I just don't think the industry is ready from a hardware standpoint, and healthy enough from a revenue standpoint, to throw money at trying to create this kind of integrated experience right now.
Maybe this was Microsoft trying to get in ahead of Apple's announcement about cross-platform gaming between iOS and OS X through Game Center, which seems to have been strangely under-reported.
The thing is, E3 is not really about mobile, which I would argue is driven by indie developers. I wouldn't expect indies to get a booth or try to do a keynote that overshadows the big three - it's a losing game to even try.
Mobile is not constrained by the same seasons that consoles need to adhere to. A game drought right after the holidays, show off your stuff at E3, then start warming up again in the summer and get ready for a release bonanza for the next holiday season.
Mobile is all year around and online with little showings here and there between WWDC, GDC, PAX, etc. In fact, mobile devs are usually told not to expect a great deal of coverage around E3 because everyone is waiting with baited breath for what is going on in the console world.
Although, Pocket Gamer is one of the few sites that actually manages to keep the mobile dream alive during E3 week while sites like IGN completely shuts down their mobile category.
About Microsoft SmartGlass, I am excited about it from a consumer point of view. It definitely won't be something that a mobile dev will be able to take advantage of but I feel like many console games are already trying to take advantage of mobile devices as an extension of the game experience.
The last console game I played was Skyrim and I played it with my iPad at my side. I was constantly on the skyrim wiki, looking for trainers, looking for information about certain side quests so I accidentally didn't miss something and it was a bit of a pain that the experience on the iPad was not directly connected to my game.
Ideally, I want my quest and map screens to be on my iPad so I don't have to constantly interrupt the flow of the game to open the screen. I want to have it automatically update my position so I can just glance over and see how much farther I can get. Or be able to use a more intuitive touch screen UI for managing my inventory and my gigantic number of quests that are uncompleted.
Let's face it, when you have 200 uncompleted quests, you want to be able to filter and mark some as higher priorities over others without activating them as waypoints. The game controller is never going to be great at a complex interface like that.
Also, it would be nice to be able to just leave the Xbox on and manage your inventory and quests while you are away from the TV.
I don't think fragmentation will be a problem. I would assume they would try some kind of reverse airplay where they would run a virtual mobile screen on the Xbox and stream that to the mobile device and in return stream the input back to the Xbox so it can update screen state and send the result back to the device.
This should work on any device, they would only need to account for different screen resolutions which shouldn't be a big deal. Maybe there will be a little lag but it shouldn't be bad.
All in all I think this is a great response to the Wii-U.
While I don't think Nintendo needs to worry because people will always buy Mario and Zelda, I do think that Microsoft was caught with its pants down over the original Wii controller and this is a way for it to offer dual screen gaming if it really catches on. And it doesn't need to require customers to buy a controller with an expensive touch screen built into it.
