#Gamelab2014 | Panel: FUTURE of MOBILE GAMING

The first round table about the future of video gaming started fiercely, though it lost heart just as it was getting to the meat of the subject. Nobody spoke to a feasible future full of VR, AR, and natural gaming. The focus was instead on more immediate challenges, such as 4K, tablets as second screens, and true multiplatform games.

Xavier Carrillo, from Digital Legends (which was highly successful back in the time of Nokia NGage), said that the video game market is growing very aggressively in parallel with the slow decline of the console market. Likewise, mobile games have reached an unprecedented audience. Mobile games are designed for children, for grown-ups, and even for cats – groundbreaking.

Carrillo observed that the real battle will happen in the living rooms, where tablets are about to start a war against consoles. Powerhouses like Google, Apple, and Amazon are developing controllers nearly as large as the device they are plugged into, which seems like nonsense until you look at the big picture and realize the aim to to take over as the center of home leisure.

Lastly, the battery issue came up. The headline: it doesn’t matter how much batteries are improved. The longer they last, the more we’ll ask of them. It’s a never-ending arms race, just like it happened with heating and noise issues in consoles. As long as nobody invents an überbattery, there’ll be room for portable consoles like the PS Vita.

Sean Alexander from Microsoft praised Barcelona’s beauty and local gastronomy before talking about domotics and automotics, but nothing approaching sci-fi yet.

Alexander’s most remarkable contribution was about true multiplatform. He foretold a near future scenario where some players would be at home playing a FPS and others controlling that same game’s tactical and management features on the fly. As an example, he stated that he couldn’t imagine anyone playing as demanding a game as HALO on a daily commute on the bus. Controllers and UI are still a drawback, he added.

Miguel Ángel Pastor, from Halfbrick (Fruit Ninja, Jetpack Joyride) underlined that developing for Android was nothing but a nightmare. When you have to develop for Android, you must do so with only the five or six most popular models in mind. This aside from the mayhem found in the Chinese and Japanese markets, where devices completely unknown elsewhere top the charts. Halfbrick’s idea was to bring the console experience to mobile, and as of today iOS is the nearest thing, followed by Windows Phone. With Android, most of the recent devices are as powerful as they are untameable.

Sony’s Robert Schoeppe highlighted the importance of testing prior to release, because these days companies can’t afford to launch a game, earn 90% of the profit in the first 90 days, and then jump onto the next game without looking back.

Schoeppe also talked about the key role of casual gaming, holding appeal for people that never discovered video games before, and predicting that a percentage of those players will level up to more serious and complex games later. He also joked about not being able to imagine his mother playing with an Oculus Rift.

This article was written and published by Appszoom editor Peter Warrior (@PeterWarrior_AZ).