Entries from May 2009 ↓

What we are currently seeing with mobile telephones is the fastest and biggest ever change  in video gaming. Developments are almost daily as the competitive war between handset providers power the market forwards. There are a number of reason this has come about.

• The setting up of Application stores by the handset manufacturers has simplified the market. Before this a game developer or publisher had to deal with hundreds of airtime providers in a highly fragmented market.
• The availability of cheap, low power processing. There has been a revolution in just how much processing horsepower phones have. They are now the equivalent of a desk top PC of not so long ago.
• Building user interfaces into phones. Accelerometers and touch screens lead to gesture control which is perfect for gaming.
• The drive to a Swiss Army Penknife, universal pocket device. Still camera, video camera, MP3 player, video player, gaming machine, GPS device, web browser, personal organiser, email terminal, telephone etc etc.
• The need for the mobile telephone industry to find new markets now that the voice telephony market is saturated in most countries.

The current best, hottest, latest handset to appear is the Samsung i7500 which uses the Android operating system from Google. It is an amazing device. It’s HVGA AMOLED display makes LCDs look like the old technology they are. The 5 Megapixel camera with flash, autofocus, image stabiliser and geo tagging is good enough to use as a dedicated camera. It would take a massive article to describe everything that this phone is capable of. And Android seems to be emerging to be the best all round system for these devices.

But the Google operating system is not alone in advancing quickly. The media is all abuzz over the forthcoming Palm Pre, which is looking like it is going to be massive.

And pretty soon we are going to see the third generation iPhones, with multiple models. Also V3 of the iPhone operating system is imminent. But from rumours that are emerging these are looking like a partial catch up with Android. What is for sure is that the iPhone App Store and iTunes are still massively ahead of the competition. But this could change very quickly with services like Spotify around.

These are all amazing devices that would have been unbelievable just a couple of years ago. As they proliferate and prices come down they will take over from simple phones. This is going to put a lot of processing power in the pockets of hundreds of millions of people, which will be a revolution and not just for gaming.

Just how long can this level of theft go on? And after the immense scale of thieving of Spore you would have to wonder whether Electronic Arts will give up on the PC, as so many other publishers already have.

The rumour mills are running hot after Microsoft put the following in a job advertisement: “And that’s not all, Microsoft is currently building a backend capable of hosting a 300,000 player game in real-time with real money on the line (anti-cheating, etc).”

This will bring films, TV and live sports onto Live. Which means that soon you will be able to also enjoy all this on your Zune HD! Microsoft really are bringing everything together under one roof.

Using Sky on Xbox will be better than the existing Sky service because you will be able to use all the Live community features at the same time. So you can watch a live football match whilst chatting about it to your friends all over the country.

The Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property (SABIP) commissioned new research that has 7 million people in the UK stealing content online.

Researchers discovered 1.3 million people using one file sharing network on one weekday alone. They think that over a year they had free access to stolen material worth £120 billion.

We are experiencing the biggest glut of stealing in the history of mankind. As we move to a knowledge based economy we must protect people’s work from theft, otherwise it will not be worth creating these products and the development of mankind as a whole will be held back.

Nobody can deny that Microsoft have done it. They have become a success in only the second generation of their console product. And against embedded competition.

Xbox is now a license to print money. And if they manage it right it will become a bigger cash cow than their PC software ever was.

Microsoft’s genius was that they saw beyond the box and they saw beyond the packaged games. They realised that the future of gaming was an online service. An online service that will ultimately work with several different boxes. And an online service that is growing to be independent of packaged games. Xbox Live is that service, the biggest game portal in the world and by far the most valuable property in the history of video gaming.

Eventually you will be able to access Live from your television, from your phone and from the seatback screen when you are flying. It will be all things to all people. What we have seen thus far is only the beginning.

I have written about this before and for the gaming industry it is a far bigger problem than violence in games (which isn’t really a problem except in the minds of ignorant commentators). Gaming is really great because it gives you skills to solve problems then rewards you for solving them. For most this mechanism is rewarding, for some it is addictive.

This latest research by the University of Sydney looked at 2,000 gamers worldwide so is fairly representative. Quite interestingly they say that the game addicts have other mental health problems and that the gaming addiction is just the manifestation of those problems.

The good news is that 92% of gamers get healthy enjoyment from their pastime.