MGF 2009: 'Stop the porting madness!'

It's not easy coming from the online gaming space to mobile, particularly when you realise the technical complexity in rolling a game out across thousands of handsets, when you're used to making one Flash build for websites.

“Stop the porting madness is the only thing that we can say about mobile,” said Ami Ben David, senior VP of international operations at Oberon Media, speaking in a cross-platform games panel at today's Mobile Games Forum in London.

“It's just unbelievably mad the amount of ports we have to support for no commercial reason, and that's something that needs to change in the industry.”

A publisher complaining about porting isn't news, of course - it's been a feature of mobile games industry conferences for years now. But his quotes show how the frustration has shifted from porting per se to the fact that many of the ports required by operators don't make any money for the publishers.

The session also considered the potential for truly synchronous cross-platform gaming, where mobile gamers play against online gamers in real-time. Does it make any sense to connect mobile gamers with online gamers?

“It's definitely interesting and something we are looking at,” said Wilhelm Taht, head of EMEA Marketing at RealNetworks. “It's something you might see happening in 2009.”

However, his fellow panellists said there were obstacles. “There are several things that need to happen,” said Ben David.

“Is it fun? Yes, and we're definitely going to support this level of things. But if we're talking about mass-level adoption, it has to be on a flat 3G tariff. That's a requirement, although if people can play on a wi-fi connection at home, that's also good.”

“It's really hard to get mobile users and online users playing each other,” agreed Joony Koo, senior manager in Com2uS' international business division.

However, he stressed there are other ways for mobile games to connect to online titles - for example one game in South Korea where people playing a mobile game can buy items within that game for the PC version, at a discount to what they would pay on PC.

The panel also considered whether Flash will become a bigger factor on mobile. “We have thousands of games ready to deploy, so we'll be happy when it happens. But it's not there yet - in 2009 it's not going to be a significant part of our revenues,” said Ben David.

Meanwhile, Taht pointed out that Flash on mobile doesn't remove fragmentation problems there are still different versions to support. And in South Korea? “There is some [Flash on mobiles] but it's not really key in Korea,” said Koo. “We have one team dedicated to it, but...”