Multiplayer gaming plagued by latency issues

In the burgeoning mobile game industry, multiplayer gaming and richly interactive community functions are on the cutting-edge. In February 2005, a Juniper Research report projected the worldwide mobile game market will be worth $18.5 billion by 2009, and multiplayer mobile gaming is expected to contribute to that growth.

As the mobile phone is first and foremost a communication device, it follows that mobile games should offer consumers the opportunity to interact with a multitude of competitors across a variety of carriers and handsets. Freshly updated content has the potential to further enrich the multiplayer gaming experience. Therefore, subscription-based multiplayer mobile games are a natural market leader. However, major challenges to the development of multiplayer mobile games exist, including latency issues and the Holy Grail of “write once run everywhere.”

Exit Games USA’s CEO Tom Sperry believes in the future of multiplayer mobile gaming. His company launched BREW Extension in 2005— the only public BREW multiplayer API for game developers and publishers to create cross-platform multiplayer games. To Sperry, getting carrier networks and handsets up to the same standards is a great challenge facing the industry. Tool sets like BREW help enable multiplayer games and community features, he says, and at the same time contribute to the evolution of connecting gaming. “BREW has distinct advantages over its competitors like more direct access to hardware which allows for much faster response times,” he says. “Plus Qualcomm’s focus on quality, like the NSTL [National Software Testing Labs] certification process, and their developer support makes BREW the language of choice for high quality games that drive revenue for all parties---carrier, publishers and developers.”

Solving lag time

The challenge then is getting the networks and handsets up-to-date—not any easy thing when you’re talking about billions of handsets and dozens of operators in a worldwide market. Juniper Research principal analyst Windsor Holden says the latency issue is the main problem hindering growth in the multiplayer mobile game market. “There’s far too much of a time lag,” Holden says. “It’s coming down now thanks to 3G, but the key for true, real-time multiplayer gaming is lowering the latency so you can have this broadband like experience.” Reduced latency times allow for connected community features like buddy lists and in-game voice components. In addition, enhanced handset capabilities offer the ability to process faster and display richer graphics that streamline the gaming process and better entice the consumer. “You need to be smarter and understand what it means to build community,” Sperry says. In an industry where the implementation of technical progression occurs slowly, patience is a virtue, but it is up to the developers and producers to make the best of what is currently available. “I don’t like to criticize the networks and the handsets, you have to design based on what you’ve got,” Sperry reasons. “We’re going to continue to create the most bleeding0edge games and be pushing the networks and the handset makers to support them.”

Another potential key factor will be the influence of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture. Though at this point it’s little more than a theory, IMS is well-suited to handle the myriad of real-time, user-to-user features multiplayer mobile gamers will want and these presence features will emerge if IMS and SIP networks become more commonplace over the course of 2007. Although legacy infrastructure integration is only the most-often cited of many notable hurdles to IMS adoption, mobile gaming is one of the lead applications service providers plan to deploy on this network architecture. “I want to interact with my friends in ways other than calling them,” Sperry says. “I want to be able to boot up my game and find my friends, chat with them and interact with them.” However, he suggests game developers and producers should mind the constraints that come with mobile games, as well as identifying the breadth of the market the game is being developed for. “If it’s a game for Verizon’s VCAST service, you can have a top quality first-person shooter game,” he says. “But if it’s a game built for a cross-platform market, you need to take different network speeds into consideration.”

By the same token, however, Sperry feels developers and publishers need to think outside the box when it comes to multiplayer mobile games. “Publishers and developers aren’t really looking at the advantages of multiplayer gaming today,” he says. “They need to look at the mobile platform as a connected platform where it goes beyond you and me playing chess on the phone. They need to stop thinking of multiplayer as ‘head-to-head’ and change the word to ‘connected’” Like the mobile game market in general, reaching out to a demographic beyond the typical gamer audience is crucial. “Multiplayer mobile games have a fairly significant potential role to play, but they have to embrace a demographic outside what the gaming industry has traditionally gone for,” Holden says. “You’ve got to get the vendors, the operators and the content producers to sit around the table--you rarely see tri-lateral discussion.” Those discussions, he says, will contribute to another problem the mobile game industry is facing—improving the consumer experience. “It’s really tied up in the whole user-experience side of things,” he says.