DALLAS-More than a dozen major developers, publishers, handset manufacturers and technology companies are working to streamline the process for developing and delivering mobile games.
Activision Inc., Digital Chocolate, Electronic Arts, Microsoft Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Texas Instruments Inc. are part of a consortium that hopes to create a blueprint to minimize porting issues across handsets and networks. The group will establish a platform for “a common set of minimum capabilities” on devices and operating systems as a foundation on which developers can build.
Developers say porting has long shackled the content industry as the most difficult and costly aspect of building mobile games. Unlike PC or console gaming, where a handful of platforms dominate the market, mobile phones come in any number of models through dozens of networks-each with their own specifications.
“While 3-D gaming is among the hottest mobile applications today, platform fragmentation is a barrier to fully realizing gaming’s potential in the wireless marketplace,” said Richard Kerslake, worldwide general manager for TI’s OMAP platform. “By outlining an architecture for gaming platforms, these industry heavyweights will make possible even stronger future growth, exponentially accelerating the adoption of premium mobile games.
The architecture will be used to build games for high-level operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, Linux and the Symbian Ltd. OS as well as operators’ terminal platforms like SK Telecom’s WIPI GIGA.
The first reference implementations of the architecture are expected to be available in the second half of this year, and TI said it expects to deliver an implementation on its OMAP 2 platform later this year.
This latest push for standardization is not the first. The Open Mobile Alliance typically dallies in such concerns, as do Java proponents through the Java Community Process and Qualcomm Inc. through its BREW application download service.
