Despite the occasional interesting anomaly, games on mobile phones have been fairly lackluster. That’s not really the fault of the game producers as much as it has been the platforms themselves, I think – nobody wants to spend a few tens of thousands of dollars on a game that can only be run on a single model of handset (unless they’re getting some nice subsidies from the handset maker, of course).
I do have to wonder, though, if maybe the future of phone gaming isn’t platform compatibility (like the various Java flavors that should work as standards, but often don’t) but instead something more akin to the PC game space, where gamers start driving the inclusion of their preferred 3D hardware into handsets, and phones because “Nvidia phones” or “ATI Enabled.”
Just a thought, but obviously I’m not the only one thinking about it (in a more general sense; this doesn’t telescope anything one way or the other), as Nvidia has announced the GoForce 3D 4500, a new mobile gaming chipset that not only provides slick looking 3D graphics, but also MPEG4 and H.264 H.263 (Perchance to dream.) video decoding, and a hardware based 3-megapixel JPEG codec (for quickly compressing cameraphone images).
Read – Nvidia GoForce 3D 4500 Wireless Media Processor [MobileMag]
Read – NVIDIA Launches GoForce 3D 4500 Wireless Media Processor [Chait]
