I attended the Austin Game Conference last week, mostly following the mobile track. Overall, I'd say the mobile track is not as mature as some of the others, and the content seemed more fitting to people new to the mobile market rather then people currently working in the field. Still, it's always nice to pop out of the rabbit hole from time to time to hear what other industry people are talking about; and there were plenty of opportunities to have casual conversations with people from operators and development shops about the projects they're working on and the challenges they're facing.
For my conference summary, I'll start with some overall themes, then move to highlights from a few individual sessions.
There was a lot a talk about 3D graphics, and just as many mixed opinions. However, there seemed to be some confusion on why mobile 3D is such a hot topic for developers. While there were a few people who pitched this as 3D games (ala first-person shooters and N-Gage titles) and just as many people who proclaimed that mobile devices would never have the processing power or form factor for this, the real drive for mobile 3D engines is to reduce the development costs of games by moving away from bitmapped sprites that must be customized for every screen size. 3D engines (and even SVG or Flash, for that matter) should be able to scale the game canvas and objects to match the hardware, even for games that don't appear to be 3D. For example, imagine a mobile Checkers game. Using bitmap sprites, you would have to hand-draw every possible chip and board piece for all the mobile phone screen sizes you are supporting. But with a scalable engine you simply tell the code how many rows and columns should be in the grid, and that you need red and black circles to fit the grid's cell size. With the scalable engine, your post-production porting costs should go way down (which means margin's go up.)
The number of devices developers have to support is getting to be a problem logistically—not just technically. For major game titles, developers claim to be supporting 300 to 500 devices globally. Multiply that by 10 language localizations, and you now have 3,000 to 5,000 unique builds (SKUs) of your game! That's one heck of a build process, and you still have to tackle device, language, network-specific bug tracking, and possibly tweak the game play on some phone models if they can't handle the animations or other aspects of the game.
Before you can start testing though, you need actual phones—and they're not free. Nor is it free to activate phones (on all the networks you're supporting) so you can test game installation and multiplayer features. To test real-world performance, you might also need a physical man-on-the-ground in other countries to test on live networks.
The mobile game market is starting to close a bit. There used to be open opportunities for small development shops to get their titles "on-deck" (meaning, shipping pre-installed, or at least available via an operator's portal) but the operators are starting to raise quality requirements and reject mediocre games. This trend on it's own isn't necessarily bad since it implies that only quality games will make it to customer devices; however, increasing operator standards aren't the only issue. With the increasing number of devices to support combined with the need to produce quality, innovative titles, the cost to produce mobile games is increasing. We're not at the several-year production cycles that the consoles see, but top quality mobile games are now three to four month projects for a small team rather then the one man-month cycles we were seeing a couple years ago.
Wide-audience game distribution is also tied almost exclusively to operator partnerships (direct to consumer distributions models haven't been as fruitful) meaning that small shops also need business connections in addition to top-notch technical chops.
Mobile data networks got a lot of flak from developers, with complaints about variable latency, roaming costs, spotty coverage, operator-specific networking APIs, and the testing costs involved. Curiously (and sadly) enough, I didn't see many of the complainers at Markus Huttunen's presentation on "Reaching the Mass Market with Connected Mobile Games."
For more on the conference, Carlo Longino and Paul Whitaker attended many of the mobile sessions as well, and have both posted about it:
You can also find a number of additional bloggers talking about the conference via Technorati's search results.