Anytime, Anywhere Players – IGIC
November 3, 2011, International Games Innovation Conference, Orange, CA–Dave Durnil from Qualcomm presented his views of ubiquitous gaming. The advances in technology and software are making game playing available to everyone at any time.
Historically, digital games started with arcade machines. These machines still exist and bring in almost $800 M a year, down from over $8 B at its peak. The arcade games provided one motivation to innovate, to bring the games into the home. Pong led to lots of home consoles, with Atari being one of the first successful mass machines. Other platforms followed and in ’82, Coleco integrated everything in a desktop box into a handheld. Unfortunately, the actual game experience was poor, even though they licensed Donkey Kong from Nintendo.
’82 was also the year that PCs started with the Commodore 64. at this time, very few companies applied for patents, over a 25 year span, only 86 patents were issued for games. In comparison, Qualcomm has over 77 thousand patents in their portfolio. In ’85, Nintendo came out with the NES and changed gaming. One of their innovations was the new type of controller.
Nintendo tried to make the overall experience important with titles like Zelda and Mario. The games became more important than the hardware. In ’89, Sega upped the ante by going to a 16-bit CPU and very few games for the platform. They were the first to find that innovation is not everything, the context is the key. Later, Sega came out with a dual-core console, but the developer response was poor, so again, they had not games for their hardware.
Sega tried to innovate in hardware while Nintendo focused on the experience. Now, we know that the hardware focus in much less important than the games. Many people rotted throughout the industry, a typical employment pattern for an industry dominated by a few big players. The failures and missteps of other companies helps industry learning.
Innovation drives new experiences, but new is not the same as better. For example, Nintendo made the Virtual Boy in ’95 and failed to gain any audience. This box was supposed to be the successor to the original Gameboy, which sold 118 M units. The DS offered dual screens and its follow-on is the 3DS, which may be too expensive for the market. These first efforts to make a handheld game created new experiences and lead to the development of the smart phone.
The newest handheld machines are very different from the consoles. Females are a large part of this audience. This was an area for many competitors and much innovations, but most have withdrawn from the market. Some of the technologies have moved into the smart phones and tablets. Even Nokia, a phone maker tried to get into the game market with one of their phones. They didn’t learn the Sega lesson, that content matters.
More successful versions included the Sony Experia, a phone with design features from the PSP. This product led eventually to the iPhone. The arrival of the smart phone enabled more casual and on-line games on a mobile platform. This emerging market is partly responsible for the downfall of the DS and other handheld platforms. The smart phones are almost as capable as the dedicated handhelds, but offer much more functionality and better communications capabilities.
In ’09, the DS owned 70 percent of the market, followed by the PSP with 12 percent. Last year, the DS barely held on to 5 percent and the PSP got 10 percent. Everyone is moving to smart phones for their games. 8 of the top 10 downloads are games and the total numbers are growing at a very high rate. By ’15, there will be over 1B phones and most will be smart. Phones have evolved from 2G to 3G and took 10 years to get to 1B users. By ’15, there will be over 3B users on 3G and 4G phones.
All machines have a place and time. The 4-5 year console cycle is gone forever. About 350 M people identify themselves as game players, but the mobile market is much larger. Developers can make games for phones at a much lower cost than for consoles, and the potential for large profits is higher than in the console world.
Now we are seeing convergence of all the platforms. Mobile gaming innovation is changing games from simple, monotone screens, and rambling and unfocused efforts with poor sound, to games that rival PC and console games for detail and realism. The larger format tablets can use the TV as a display, while running on fairly low power, and can interface with the rest of the world through 4G and WiFi.
In the future, everything will be connected inn a massively multi-mobile environment. The problems are the growing complexity of the phones. A 4G phone has over 40 radios and must aggressively manage power because the battery technologies are not improving fast enough. The carriers have to be concerned with the total available bandwidth, especially on 4G networks.
Even though they are very capable machines, the smart phones still have many avenues for change. Displays can go to lower power with technologies like Mirasol, a reflective color display technology. Console-level GPUs will be in handheld platforms next year, and 3-D displays are already available on a number of phones. Look to see more types of sensors and more instances of augmented reality in phones.
