No Innovation in Mobile Technology or Gaming

The mobile phones in our pockets are said to be hundreds of times more powerful than the mainframes that sent rockets into orbit six decades ago. If so, why is mobile technology limited to Twitter, awkward Internet browsing, and games that look like shrunken versions of 1980's games and 3d games from the original Playstation era?

 

The compare of a mainframe and a smartphone is just a view of the surface, you have to go deeper.

Rockets: Read from sensors, compare values, add / sub values make calculations

Smartphone: Move graphics, overwrite 1000´s of single pixels multiple time a seconds (fps) and render them on a display while calculating new position ...

i know rockets are more then just + - and so on, but its a general compare.


And even the NASA is a little more then just a single freelance-developer which make the games by fun.


Best regards

Diversity

 

This is a topic that would probably fit well in the new game design forum.

Anyway, there are many games that look like modern games such as Aralon and Bladeslinger.

Probably two of the biggest reasons most mobile games are simple are 1) a lot of new first time game developers are making mobile games and 2) it makes more sense financially to make cutting edge deep games for consoles and computers because mobile players want simple games to fill a short amount of free time and developers want to make a profit.

 

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, isn't it?
People don't play complex mobile games, because there are none.

I always argue that there is some interest in good mobile games, because of handhelds like the GameBoy, NDS, PSP and PSVita.

I just said it in another post, but mobile games are joke right now. Compare it to late 90s PC gaming. PCs had less performance and still somehow produced videogame classics like Half-Life and System Shock 2.
And yet here we are, with our quadcore smartphones with gigabytes of RAM, getting a) S***ty mobile games like Angry Birds and Flappy <Everything> or b) ports of once great PC games like GTA.

Performance isn't the problem of mobile developers. They themselves are the problem.

 

Well I agree partially SniperFan. I think currently the main audience for mobile games is just casual. They use the phone to play some minutes while traveling. Complex games that take hours to dive in are usually played on PC. At least that's what I do. Tablets might be an exception though...

 

Again, a self-fulfilling prophecy. I am a Linux user and I can sing you a song about this:
No audience -> No games -> No audience

 

Hehe I see. Let's see, my submarine game will be quite complex compared to most of the other smart phone games. Will blog about it for sure later to share the results.

 

Partly I think it's because there are now so many developers making mobile games, where not a lot of them have a whole lot of time, resources, experience etc.. and so they opt to make the simplest, most minimalist, easiest-to-finish kind of games, (flappy bird?). .. trying to express gameplay in its simplest forms with the most basic graphics. There's probably far more solo developers releasing mobile games than there are larger teams with monetary resources, I'd imagine.

 

There aren't many, but the truth is that they are out there. There are RPG's and adventure games. But as few and far between as those games are, even fewer people are playing them, proportionally.

 

Id like to see nasa make gta5 run on the xbox360.

 

If I'm sitting at home, I'm not going to pick up my phone to play a complex game. I'm going to play it on my huge TV. Or maybe my not-as-huge monitor. Definitely not my 5" phone. And that's only considering the visual aspect.

Controls? Ugh. Mobile controls are awful by their very nature. Traditional action games don't work on a touchscreen device. Until some decent controllers come out for them, it's just a no-go.

And if I'm out and about, I need a game that can be paused and *closed* at any given moment without harming my experience of the game. If I'm in the middle of the jungle in Final Fantasy and have to restart at a point 30 minutes in my past because I got a phone call, I'm going to be very pissed. Having to restart that Angry Birds level is nothing in comparison.

People have had the same complaint about mobile games (both on handheld consoles and phone) for years. They need to be able to put them down at any time.

 

If you see a niche, fill it.

 

That's probably the best advice I've seen on here.

 

I agree, you should make some innovative games, or give us your innovative ideas for blockbusters so we can make them.

 

You need an idea guy?

 

At least some of the problem is the user interface. PC games like Half-Life relied on the keyboard and mouse. A smartphone lacks those interfaces. A small touchscreen is not a great interface for complex games. The most popular smartphone games are the ones that have been simple enough to thrive with the simple touchscreen interface.

 

Sure, but I liked playing things like RPG's on my Galaxy note.. I don't mind better games on mobile, it's just not my go to like a PC / console would be.

 

Sure, but I feel like mobile developers don't even try.

 

Mobile developers seem not only to be hindered by the mobile phone form factor that remains largely unchanged from even a decade ago, but also by artificial restrictions placed by the operating system, vendors, and even manufacturers themselves.

While I think there's a lot more that a mobile technology and games could do, I also think the prevalent stone age mentality and morality (i.e. we must limit devices to prevent evil things), as well as the myopic concern of profitability in the mobile scene, hinders a lot of potential progress and innovation.

 

It would be able to run on the Nexus 9 thanks to the Tegra k1.

 

Twitter is a popular app that doesn't benefit much from better graphics.

The screen is small. The phone has to fit in your pocket.

Those old mainframes were REALLY slow. Comparatively, a mobile phone is much more powerful, but still a lot slower than a modern desktop or console. Certain operations, such as high-count particle effects and skinning lots of bones, are quite taxing on the mobile cpu.

 

Look farther afield. Folks in the Arduino community are doing exceptional work hooking up sensors of all kinds to mobiles as well as using them for robotics and rocketry control systems for input, calculations and output. As well in the gaming industry in its current state..lack of original creativity. Shoot em up bang bangs and endless runners dominate the mindsets. Mind you..I do not mean this as a blanket statement..so don't jump the gun..so to speak.

 

with the numbers of games that are released on mobile everyday, it become hard to do something. you actually have more chance to get ebola than being successful here.
but fortunately most of them are rubbish.
I think if you want have some success you can try:

• to find a niche
• create a very original game
• having a very polished and addictive classic game. ( take summoners war for exemple)

 

Mobile phone's hardwares are making quantum leaps and bounds - the latest iPhone 6's graphics chip PowerVR GX6450 has the performance of 115 GFLOPS that's almost as fast as my 2010 Macbook Pro's Nvidia GeForce 320M which has the performance of 137 GFLOPS! And you can play GTA IV (one of the most graphically demanding game back then) at 18 fps on a Macbook Pro 2010 with Nvidia GeForce 320M! It's about half of what PS3's RSX's 192 GFLOPS or XBox 360's Xenos graphics unit's 240 GFLOPS. That itself is already monumental innovation.

So, the question is why can't games run GTA IV graphics?
Well, It is because majority of the mobile game developers are one-man garage team with extremely limited budget. Most of them are first time coders too and majority of the game that comes out are crudely drawn "coder's art" that I wouldn't even consider them passing art school entrance requirement.

I think given enough resources, mobile phone gaming can look just as good as last generation's consoles (PS3/XBOX360) if not more.

As for gameplay innovation - mobile phone gaming has already proven itself over the traditional console and PC gaming in term of gameplay - we now have gestural touch based gameplay combined with, GPS, camera, accelerometer, gyroscope input at a unprecedented level of input integration. The mobile phone nowadays already far exceed consoles or PC in term of number of types of input avaliable to developers and gamers. There is a lot of room for innovation from this alone.