The Cambridge Wireless Games SIG met again yesterday. I’d participated in last year’s SIG, enjoyed it, and decided to go along and see what the SIG had been up to since last year.

Jon Hare of Tower Games was first up and gave an entertaining and informative talk on Mobile Games Development & how not to do it. Jon is a veteran of the UK games industry with many #1 games to his credit and it was useful to hear his inside perspective on the state of the mobile games industry in the UK and in general.

UK mobile developers will be familiar with some of the problems Jon noted - difficulty in developing and testing for the huge range of handsets that need to be supported, competition from low labour-cost economies, pitching arrangements that mean that development costs have to be incurred well before it’s know whether a game will actually be bought and a focus on brand-based games rather than original games. There seemed to be general agreement from the other mobile developers in the room on these issues.

So, how to address these issues?

The handset diversity issue is hoped to become less acute over the next 3-5 years with major players trying to get standard platforms in place across a range of devices. Given that the cost of variant development accounts for around 70% of the total costs of a game development (according to Jon) any improvement in this area could be significant.

However, I’m not clear how stable any move to less diversity will be. I’ve argued elsewhere that device manufacturers will still want to distinguish their devices from others in the market and in order to do so the software using those devices will have to take advantage of those differences. Furthermore, even if devices become less diverse, how long will this situation last before the market fragments again?

Offshoring and outsourcing programming work were floated as solutions to the labour cost issue. The UK has a long experience in the games industry and consequently has a wealth of senior people with the skills and knowledge to manage game development. Perhaps the solution is to hook up with cheaper overseas development organisations - and at least one attendee’s organisation was using this approach successfully.

Several representatives from government funding bodies also noted schemes to help game developers, including subsidies for conference attendance, trade missions, partnering, training and joint marketing funding. However, Jon gave an example of a friend overseas who is able to get 75% of his game development costs back from his government. It seems that the UK still has some way to go to match these incentives aside from any argument over whether it should try to do so.

Improvements in the access channels between mobile phone users and game developers are expected to benefit developers too. These could be increased use of the internet to download games to phones and better search capabilities on phones to enable users to find games. Jon gave an example from a few years ago where he and his colleagues took his company’s accountant through the process of using a phone to download their game. Nineteen separate processes were involved! As well as improving download rates, direct consumer access, through simple to use channels, should also help improve the margins for game developers and so ease the funding situation.

One of Jon’s skills is bringing original games to market. However, the mobile market is dominated by brand-based games - think Who Wants to be a Millionaire or Colin McRae Rally. Various factors in the mobile industry conspire to make it difficult to bring original games to the mobile platform - not least of which is the 16 character space on the user’s phone that you have to promote your game. When you only have 16 characters to play with it’s important that the user recognises the name and this is where the brand helps massively. Again, improvements in direct access between users and game developers is hoped to improve this situation.

To enable investment to be returned many times, one suggestion was that developers set up a configurable games platform/production pipeline that could be used to produce large numbers of game variants. This would support game conversion (porting) to multiple handsets, for multiple operators, for multiple locales etc. However, as well as managing the usual Software Product Line issues, in doing this you also need to take care over who owns the IP rights to your games - make sure your first customer doesn’t tie up all your rights and then fail to commission a sufficient number of variants to allow you to make money.

Jon concluded his talk with an slide introducing Matt Spall of morpheme - Mobile Games Development - Matt knows how to do it. (More on Matt’s talk next)