In this exclusive interview held shortly before this year's Brew Conference 2007, Mike Yuen, head of the Qualcomm Gaming Group talked to Games On Deck about the difficulties of mobile development, including platform fragmentation and content distribution, and discusses what Qualcomm is trying to do to change things.
Games On Deck: Let's start out by talking about some of the perceived difficulties in mobile development. A lot of the people who make games for mobile complain about certain common things, mostly regarding inconsistency of platform. There's so many different handsets with different screen sizes, interfaces, processors, and architectures you've got to worry about.
Mike Yuen: We'd like to think that we have a little more consistency in that platform, and we don't have as much fragmentation, primarily because we have a standard. On our platform, the APIs are consistent. If you're running Brew 2.0 here in the U.S., and you're running Brew 2.0 in China as a developer, the game will run. There's localization, and there might be some keypad issues, but the core platform doesn't get fragmented. If we wanted to add in a new technology, we would use extensions to extend our platform.
That's one of the key things about Brew which has brought people in from that fragmentation standpoint, because otherwise, every operator you work with could be very different. A Sprint game doesn't run on NTT DoCoMo's Java-based platform, because it's been fragmented to a certain extent. We'd like to think that what we've done is we've been able to aggregate all these Brew operators so that it's a consistent platform. We've removed hurdles that developers would otherwise face in developing games.
GOD: So basically, Brew provides a more consistent platform for developers to make their content on. Another common complaint in this space with developers is one that might not be within the scope of Qualcomm and Brew, but might be something that Brew can help out with. It has to do with promotion once a title is on a device.
There are titles that are preloaded, but anytime anyone wants to get something new, it's buried in the interface. The interface is difficult to navigate and makes it hard to find content. Even when people do find content, it's basically just a text listing, and that doesn't lend itself very well to differentiation. Some people tend to gravitate toward licensed properties, or toward remakes of things they've already played. So if you want to build something interesting for mobile, how can Brew help developers?
MY: What you're talking about is the dreaded "one line of text." That's the way mobile started. Mobile is a technology and business that has accelerated very quickly in the last few years, so we started with a line of text. From a Brew perspective, one of things we offer is a technology called uiOne. It offers much richer user interface and an experience that can be built on devices. Rather than one line of text, we can now build a much richer interactive and dynamic interface. It addresses the issue of discovery, and now you can fully support things like merchandising and marketing. More comprehensive and viable business models can be taken care of though this technology.
O2, an operator in the UK actually has our uiOne technology running on their devices as do others such as Alltel here in the U.S. Not only does it make it easier for consumers to shop and find a developer's or publisher's particular title, but it's also helpful to the operator, since it allows for more consistent user interface versus working with different OEMs and implementing different interfaces.
The evolution where we're heading is something called Brew Gaming Signature Solution, and it's truly a next-gen service. We're going to use uiOne as the basis to build that client-side application. Instead of thinking about lines of text and drilling down through lots of click-throughs to get to different menus, there will be much richer visual interface on a homepage of sorts where you can jump to different areas.
