From Leader To Follower : Nokia Recognises The Game Has Changed
Nokia’s Head of Development Aki Jarvilehto chose this morning’s opening keynote of the game maker’s conference Develop to address the future of mobile gaming, as well as their part in it.
Predicting a €4.2 billion market by 2011, he discussed the presence of new games driven by high production values and ‘disruptive technology’ such as accelerometers, touchscreens, and GPS in particular. He also spoke at length of the frustration that developers faced programming for a range of handsets, and the improvements a more standardised format could offer. Remind you of any phone?
Despite this veiled admission at the iPhone’s overnight dominance in the mobile gaming sector, he also was prepared to reveal his intentions for the future of the format including key target demographics, innovative concepts and even forthcoming titles.
The exciting development was that some of these were cross-platform, meaning a shift to developing for other phones than their own, in an effort to break down the strong position Apple currently enjoys. He also proposed intriguing concepts such as the phone being a surrogate console in emerging markets, with TV-Out allowing it to be hooked up to provide a gaming experience good enough for the big screen.
Also, the admittance of a spec standardisation substantiates with the rumours of the Nokia Tube becoming an entire range spanning the market as opposed to a single model. “Nokia is going to support at all prices points”, he said, adding that the same is true of accelerometers, possibly even magnetometers, and cross-platform functions “which will be shipping in most of our devices”.
However, Aki saw GPS as the paradigm shift in mobile games, taking the portable nature of a handset and imbuing the essence of a game’s functionality in this feature: “We’re looking into concepts that generate content from the city maps we have available. We’re finding ways of making gameplay relevant,” he said, saying such data could be used in a racing game, for instance, to drive a player’s emotional involvement in their game. “This will be one of the game changing things moving forward.”
Exciting times.
Source : Develop
