Symbian neglected at quiet mobile gaming show

GIVEN THAT GAMING is one of the few sectors within the mobile phone industry that is actually booming, the first day of the Mobile Entertainment Forum held at London's Islington Design Centre was remarkably quiet.

Only a few stalwarts chose to exhibit while the rest of the visitors appeared content to just attend the conferences.

However, talking to some of the attendees, like Iomo, it became obvious that Germany - not the UK - is presently Europe's biggest market for mobile games.

Questions converging the obvious development platform for mobile phone games got some very strange answers.

Developers appear to be concentrating very much on Java/J2ME at the expense of rivals such as Brew and MoFun. More surprising was the general reluctance to develop games for Symbian given that two of the most popular games handsets - 7210 and the 7650 - are from Nokia.

The difference was ably demonstrated by Distinctive Developments which has two versions of its Snowboard X game available to run on the 7650.

The Symbian version was significantly better - especially in terms of graphics - than the J2ME version. Stranger still is the fact that margins in mobile gaming are much higher than other forms of mobile content provision with a software distributor like Handango returning 70 per cent of the retail price for a game back to its owner.

It's apparent that the big names in the games industry are still holding back - waiting for the number of game enabled handsets and mobile games players to rise to acceptable levels.

Predictably, just around the corner, the magazine publishers are playing a waiting game too. Future Publishing of Bath, England was spotted sniffing around the show ready to launch a mobile gaming title at the first scent of a few good advertisers.µ

L'INQ
L'INQ