Mobile phone gaming gears up to go 3D

WE HAD SEVERAL meetings here with publishers of mobile content such as Nokia, Sony Ericsson, EA and Gameloft.

Gameloft turned in revenue of 88.8 million dollars in 2006 (EA did around $100M), which shows that slowly but certainly, revenues of wallpaper and ringtone publishers are going down and that gaming is on the rise.

Most interesting is the fact that 3D games are taking over production, doubling the numbers from the last year. For Gameloft, 2007 will see twenty 3D games and thrity 2D ones, and the number of 2D games is expected to decline further and further. The frim is also a launch partner of Nokia's N-Gage project with seven announced titles.

What made this possible is the change in the storage space available for games. Two years ago, games were ranging from 150-300KB in size and distribution was mostly done via WAP.

Today, most of users have either EDGE or UMTS phones and delivery is more and more via "mobile broadband connection", thus budgets have risen to two megabytes for 3D (500-700KB for 2D ones). Suggestions are that these will 5-10MB in five years time - which is as nothing compared to 15-30GB disk budget PC game developers are talking about. µ