AFP – TheSun. Game makers are ringing the chances with more engaging video games on the net-enabled mobile devices and gizmos

Tetsuya Ide doesn’t own an iPhone, but the teenage computer boffin is betting that Apple’s hit gadget is the key to having a new generation of video game players in the palm of his hand. He’s not the only one. Video game console titans like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are facing growing competition from the increasing popularity of games played on mobile telephones or Internet-enables gizmos.

“A game’s creativity used to depend on the hardware,” said Ide, a 19-year old computer programming student who is developing an iPhone game as part of his studies. ” A succesful game now is one that’s simple and reaches a wide network of people,” he told AFP at last weekend’s Tokyo Game Show.

Major industry players have also begun to recognize the potential of smartphones as a springboard to reach casual gamers, due to the runaway popularity of the iPhone and iPod Touch, both of which debuted two years ago. iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 2G are most popular now.

Of the 758 software titles on display at this year’s Tokyo Game Show, 168 were designed for mobile telephones – twice as many as last year. ” Cellphones are a very promising platform,” said Kazumi Kitaue, chief executive of Konami Digital Entertainment, publisher of video games including the Metal Gear and Silent Hill series.

“The appeal is that everyone owns one. A family with three children may have one PlayStation 3, but three cellphones with which they can download and play games.” Making games for mobile phones also enables developers to reduce costs in the face of the worst global economic downturns in decades.

“They won’t have to spend a great deal of money and effort developing new software,” said Hirokazu Hamamura, president of Enterbrain Inc, a video game magazine publisher, adding that they’ll be able to capture a client base through the iTunes stores, referring to Apple’s portal for downloading music and games.

With their high-resolution images, role-playing games for the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 360 consoles often demand budgets comparable to those Hollywood blockbusters, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars. In contrast, a cellphone game can cost just a few thousand dollars to develop.

Media magic, a company that develops games for Japanese cellphones, is among those firms that seek a bright future for games for the iPhone. “We saw the iPhone as a threat in the beginning. But since the same device is used all over the world, there is greater opportunity for a bigger market’” said Mitsuru Oshibo, a content develop with the firm.

About 80% of game developers in Japan have dabbled in creating games for the iPhone, according to an analysis of 100 companies by CRI Middleware Co, which creates software components for video games. But bigger game developers are feeling the pressure as smartphones threaten to sap the industry’s traditional sources of revenue from sales of games for console such as the PS3, the Xbox 360 or Ninento’s Wii.

Apple boasts hundreds of thousands of applications in the App Store, some of which are priced at less than US$1. Analysts say the company attracts at least 80,000 downloads each day, but with prices so low, some developers are warry about jumping on the band-wagon.

“When we look at that business model, we ask ourselves: ‘When can we really make the shift’?” asked Shin Unozawa, head of Namco Bandai, the Japanese company behind such games as Pac-Man and Tekken. “It’s quite frightening to think of changing to a different model,” he said.

Even so, Bandai Namco said it is stepping up game developement for Apple gadgets, showing at the Tokyo Game Showits Ace Combat Xi arcade-style action game formatted specifically for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Competition among hardware makers is also hotting up. Apple this month introduced a revamped version of iPod Touch, with founder Steve Jobs calling it a “great game machine”. That came after Sony released in June a Playstation Portable Go handheld game, movie and music gadget, seeking to challenge the success of Ninento’s DS handheld machine. – AFP

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