Future of Mobile Gaming


I am a contributing writer to PDAGround. Once a month Andrew sends out a topic to several developers. Below is this months questions and my responses.

Questions: Will Pocket PC or Palm OS games still be popular given all the latest comptetition. Also it is thought the future of mobile games belongs to Java . What do you think about this situation? Will graphics accelerator help to PDA change these ideas?

Response: I don’t think people purchase PDA’s to play games, they buy a PDA for the organization tools and the fact it can run games is a huge bonus. I don’t see that niche going away. Additionally the Pocket PC is making giants steps in supporting graphics and sound plus the tools for developers keep improving. This is allowing developers to make a traditional desktop game and a mobile version simultaneously. In regards to Java, some developers love it others hate it. Java is positioning itself as the development environment to use as it is supported across such varied hardware, e.g., phones, PCs, and PDAs. However, experience has shown that Java apps need a lot of customization on each hardware type which puts it at a disadvantage. Flash and .net are both being pushed hard by their respective companies to compete with Java and I personally am a big fan of Flash. Flash phones are gaining momentum positioning it very well especially when you consider that over 90% of PCs already have Flash installed.