Friday 10 May 2013

The Radical Development of Mobile Gaming

So, I have been looking around various websites to cover gaming in a much more local level when I stumbled onto the website for the game Celtic Heroes by One Thumb Mobile which was celebrating their latest patch. I can’t tell you much about my gameplay experience since the game is an iDevice exclusive, but from what I’ve seen it is surprisingly impressive.

Celtic Heroes, for those unaware, is a fully three-dimensional  MMORPG set in the Celtic period, available on iDevice. Keep this in mind: a fully 3D MMORPG inside a phone. This is a remarkable concept that anyone could see as challenging, but the fact that One Thumb Mobile achieved it, and achieved it well enough to justify a content patch post-release and be nominated for an award, truly shows just how mobile gaming is growing at such a remarkable pace even here in Scotland alone!

I do wonder: is the mobile scene becoming the new PC market?

  • about 47.6% of them were developing for both mobile games and PC games,
  • approximately 42.9% working on mobile gaming but not PC,
  • 1.59% working on PC but not mobile,
  • 7.94% working on neither platform.
That’s a significant number of developers that are possibly influencing the mobile market with game genres generally associated with PC gaming: first it was the first person shooters, then the MMORPGs and even the Massive Online Battle Arenas (MOBAs) are starting to spawn on the mobile market.

Perhaps it was the Flash games being touched up and turned to “apps” during the rising popularity of Apple’s App store; perhaps it was the indie developers worldwide trying to convert their mobile games to PC for further revenue on Desura and Steam. Whatever has spawned this sudden alliance of PC and Mobile gaming, it’ll be nice to see “oor bonnie” game developers take heed and slowly make higher concept games. Be it Denki’s Destiny Killer or a dark horse in the works. I’d open up the possibility of the winner of YoYoGames’ Win Big competition being the pioneer of double-A game development in Scotland: just in time for Ouya and its like!

What I want to know is where do you think the road to the future leads?

Greg Baxter
Amber Glass Broadcast

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