Introduction

The first couple of days at the Game Developers Conference are always..interesting. The main conference and the exhibit hall don't actually open until this morning but side conferences were held on Monday and Tuesday at neighboring hotels. The Fairmont Hotel hosted the Mobile Games Conference for developers of mobile phone games. Meanwhile the Marriott held the Serious Games Summitt for companies that create products that may look like games, but are used for training and learning purposes for clients like the military and government agencies. In other words, nothing too terribly exciting for hardcore gamers.

Today the full GDC experience is set to begin and I'll be there to cover the keynotes, the awards later tonight, and various other things. Stay tuned..it will be good.

The following stuff is from a couple of personal one-on-one meetings I had during the first two days of GDC

Nokia's Plans For Mobile Phone Games

A few years ago, Nokia released their first entry into the portable games market with the N-Gage, a device which had an almost unworkable design when it first came out (remember the taco pose when using it as a phone?) While Nokia released a much better design with the N-Gage QD less than a year later, the damage had been done. Or had it?

While the N-Gage console design is now almost a memory, Nokia itself is still a major player in the portable games market. On Monday at the Game Developers Conference, FiringSquad chatted briefly with Nokia's gaming marketing head Kamar Shah to get some more info about Nokia's new push towards the mobile game market. As Shah explained to us, they have no need to complete with the Sonys and Nintendos of the world when they have 25 million "smartphones" that can deliver games. As he told us, "We had a lot of learning from N-Gage."

One of the big problems in the mobile phone game market is the actual delivery of the games themselves. While some people can buy boxed copies of a game much like a typical console or PC game title, many others choose to download games through their wireless phone service. The problem? As Shah admitted, about 10 percent of paid games fail to download and install when using that method. He admitted that Nokia needs to do something to get that percentage down in order to make mobile phone games a better experience for the user.

Other ways to improve the game experience on mobile phones is with technology and Shah told us things like 3D graphics acceleration and landscape style screens will help in doing that. And he hinted, "WiFi is just around the corner," which means that more and more mobile phones will have the high speed wireless broadband access like Sony's PSP and Nintendo's DS portable consoles have. High tech phones will enable mobile phone games to be a bigger attraction. "As the technology gets better, the penetration gets better," Shah told us at our meeting.