Nokia Game Summit

Thanks to Gamasutra, there is a good wrap up of the Nokia Game Summit. It's interesting to see what are their research avenue and what they think is relevant

one of the event's key themes: the march towards a more ‘immersive' visual experience on the mobile platform. “People live in a 3D world in their everyday life. They will want that same 3D world in their handsets", predicted Epting, and “…we want to bring the visual experience of the real world into a mobile device.”

uuh a bad start already, I don't get it: given the screen size, 3d on a mobile phone is a very weird idea. Of course there might be some niche but I could not help thinking that it won't be the next big thing.

There are others elements in the wrap-up, but overall it seems that their discussion was lively and leading to deate about marketing in which the user (uh the consumer sorry) is not really taken into account apart from being a "cash cow" who buys 2D games (the point would be to replicate this with 3D games...)

Besides Tom Hume has also a good rant about this, I like his comment:

most of the problems Greg [Costikyan: see here, the notes from Carlo Longino] has highlighted aren't problems with the mobile games industry, but problems with the mobile games industry if they want to sell the kinds of things the console games industry sells

Here we are: "if they want to sell the kinds of things the console games industry sells", I think the mistake is to undervalue the mobile phones as gaming platform and to develop games as lower quality version of console games. Which is wrong since lots of application can take advantage of mobile devices specific features (even though it's difficult as explained by Greg Costikyan).