(via gizmodo) Mike
Langberg: “Mobile online games will succeed only if I can use my
Motorola phone on the Verizon Wireless network to play against friends
without having to know in advance what network or brand of phone they’re
using. Life’s too short for anything else.”
I agree, and it’s not clear what’s keeping this from happening right now,
or if it’s all that much of a problem (N-Gage aside). For example,
Macrospace makes Cannons
Tournament, a tournament game which is not tied to a specific
provider, but only runs on a select set of Nokia phones. It’s not the
carriers or the handset manufacturers who made this decision, though. The
Cannons
Tournament instructions suggest to me that mutiplayer games are
brokered between a central server, so there’s nothing (except demand)
keeping Macrospace from porting this to other phones. And there’s nothing
to keep any game developer from writing a game that runs on a whole mess
of different phones (I’m sure there are some good examples of this
already, but nothing springs to mind right now).