Je viens de correspondre avec Phil Steinmeyer, grand bloggeur Américan. il m'a permis de reposter son article qui semble bien intéresant :

I was a bit late to the cell phone party - I only got my first cell phone a couple years ago, and I don’t use it much (I work at home and generally spend little time on the road, so it’s kinda moot).

My phone is, I guess, a reasonable one - a fairly small Samsung X426 with a decent color screen.

As a casual game developer, I have certainly been cognizant that mobile phone gaming (generally featuring casual-style games) is a big and growing industry, but I’d never really played with it much. I tried to, but I could never get my phone to successfully download games, beyond the couple lame pre-installed ones.

I’ve stopped at the Cingular store a couple times over the years to try to get it resolved, and despite the salesman’s puttering with my phone, it wouldn’t work. Today I tried again, and low and behold, in about 30 seconds, a different salesman had it working by changing one setting in my phone’s menu options somewhere (I forget which).

Lesson 1 - mobile phones are unnecessarily complicated - to the extent that some salesmen can’t even make all their features work.

So, I downloaded a couple of games. Neither had free trials, as far as I could tell, so I paid $5.99 for one, and used a free comp. credit I’d gotten at the Casuality show for the other.

I won’t name names, but let’s say that these were both adaptations of well-known casual games - big hits in the PC space that are apparently also successful on mobile. They were from different publishers and different port-shops, so any issues were unlikely to be the result of a single party’s sloppiness. Overall, the games were…

Terrible. Just awful.

Barely any animation, low rez graphics, weak sound, and worst of all, trying to control these games with a cell phone keypad was a mess.

I’m not blaming the publishers, developers, etc. I strongly suspect the problem is just that the phone is not powerful enough for decent games. Even if it had a CPU as powerful as a desktop PC, the small screen and tiny keys would make the experience mediocre at best. But compounded with the slow processor, slow reaction times, and poor animations, it was a terrible experience.

So be it. But what I can’t understand is why this is a growth industry, and who is buying these games (more than once). I can see making a mistake one time, but I can’t see buying a second mobile phone game (unless, like me, you’re a developer trying to understand the phenomenon.)

Is my phone just uniquely unsuited to playing games versus other mobile phones, or are teenagers willing to put up with terrible games, or what? I’m really wondering how this can be a sizeable industry. I definitely understand the speaker at Casuality who said that Try Before You Buy is bad for business in mobile, because the trials are generally so disappointing…

BREW is only intended for use solely on CDMA phones(think North america). For mass market deployment, your best bet is to develop in Java, and then maybe port to BREW and other platforms. Then there is WIPI for Korean phones (also C/C++ based).

Covering each and every possible phone models is frustrating work, in one of the projects I’ve worked on, it took nearly 30 programmers to port to multiple phones(i think about 50), for that team size, you could already work on a MMORPG. Do not forget that new phones with new capabilities keep comming up every year, so you would also need to think of doing new ports every now and then.

You could get around the “frustrating keys” problem by game design - try to design one button games. I played Worms Golf on the cellphone, and it was a delight to play - only one button required at any moment.

If you want to venture into mobile phone games, porting is the most frustrating aspect that you will need to look into. Maybe you could get some port shops to do it for you. As for me, I think I’m gonna give up mobile phone development for the time being.

• Source : Red Herring (11 juillet 2006)