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 Massively Mobile is a fairly new player in the mobile gaming space, having only formally announced its formation last month from Gameloft and Activision veterans. Still, the company's console and mobile development background, coupled with their intense and uncompromising vision of mobile gaming, makes them one to watch.
We asked Massively Mobile's Creative Director Demetri Detsaridis to expand on the ideas found on the company's website, and share his thoughts on how mobile gaming can start walking the walk instead of just talking the talk:
"As Karl Marx once almost wrote:
A spectre is haunting the mobile gaming industry – the spectre of developers, yearning to do work they can be proud of, and to be taken seriously while doing it. Not far behind is its colossal shadow: the apparition of millions of mobile gamers, tired of being told they’re not really gamers, and frustrated that the state-of-the-art in mobile gaming is 20-year-old design running on 20-day-old technology. All the powers of “The Industry” have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise these spectres: carrier and publisher, IP licensor and venture capitalist, French Radicals and German police-spies...
Okay, maybe not German police-spies. But you get the point; over and over again, we hear about how huge mobile gaming is and how much bigger it’s going to get; we know that it’s the wave of the future and that it’s captured the mindshare of all of Earth’s life forms, and we know that it’s surely making somebody rich, but still…the games (not your games, mind you, but the rank and file stuff) just aren’t all that good, are they?
Put down those pitchforks; I’m not calling anybody out. We’re all developers here, we can be honest with ourselves – if any of you think that the potential of mobile gaming is fulfilled by what’s on decks right now, raise your hand! Yeah, exactly…one guy, and he looks a lot like a police-spy.
So, what do we do about that? How can we make the kinds of games that we ourselves want to play (which is, after all, why we got into this business)? Well, we can start by agreeing on a few basics. The eight points I’ve listed below are by no means exhaustive, but they do address the most frequent complaints I’ve heard about mobile games, from both gamers and fellow developers.
Fellow game makers, I give you the Mobile Developer’s Manifesto:
1. Mobile Games must be “mobile”.
Yes, all mobile games are portable by virtue of the device they run on, but are they designed that way? A quick tour around any of the major carriers’ decks will turn up quite a few that aren’t. If you can’t save the game whenever you’d like – heck, if the game isn’t constantly saving its own progress – it’s not really mobile. If a large portion of a game’s playing time consists of loading screens, that game is not really mobile.
Mobile games, even those targeted to the “hardcore gamer”, have to be quick to start and easy to resume. Without that, they’re about as mobile as a living room with a handle.
2. Mobile Games must be “games”.
Some mobile games seem to have been tuned for players so green that “Press 5 to Win” may as well flash over the opening credits. Others are packed so dense with cutscene-like animations that they recall Dragon’s Lair far more than a game on a 2-inch screen has any right to. While beginner level difficulty and virtuoso animations are terrific options to have in a game, they should remain exactly that: options, side dishes to the main course of hot, buttered gameplay.
Any mobile game without gameplay as its primary focus is not a game, it’s a tiny, expensive phone-cartoon.
Next: Mobile Games must not require more than two thumbs per player
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