All Roads Lead to Mobile - World Cyber Games to go Mobile-Only

Its 30 years from the first home videogaming console this year. Happy birthday Odyssey (later bought by Philips/Magnavox). We had one of those consoles, I believe it was the first Odyssey in Finland (it was on the US TV NTSC standard obviously, so even after the adapter to our TV set, we only got the black-and-white version visible on our TV screen, haha, but it being essentially ten variations of 'Pong' - that was not much of a loss. And yeah, this was the game where you had to place a translucent plastic sheet on the TV screen, to know which game you were playing. A few years later, we got the more advanced Philips/Magnavox Odyssey 200, which was on the European PAL standard and plugged directly to our TV set.. Our household was very popular for all the cool gadgets we always had haha)

So, fast forward 30 years, and we're now in 2012. I just saw Patryk Zabicki ie @p47 on Twitter forward a breaking story about the world championships in videogaming. Didn't you know they exist? Sure, the world champs tend to come from South Korea where there are tons of professional videogamers and several TV stations broadcast videogaming action 24 hours a day. I wrote about that all in my 2007 book Digital Korea with Jim O'Reilly, in the gaming chapter.

So yes, the world championships in videogaming are called the World Cyber Games (WCG). And today the Cadred website reports that after 12 years, the World Cyber Games this year will for the first time abandon the other platforms, in particular the PC based gaming, and will only feature championship gaming and thus championships in mobile games. Why? Because traditional game makers are all shifting to mobile. Why is that? We know, haha, because as I say about the 7th Mass Medium: "Mobile is the magical money-making machine" of course. Yes, the CEO of the WCG, Brad Lee explains in his letter to members that game makers are all increasingly making most of their money from mobile. Hence the current plan (not yet finalized) for the WCG is to make this year's event a mobile gaming only event where all prizes will be for games on mobile. Cool!

Comments

[Patryk]

I see still two problems for mobile gaming to become nearly as influential as competitive games on traditional platforms (PC).

One there are already games and culture on traditional platforms which are by design very symetrical and well balanced, but more importantly they are designed to be easily accessible even for non-gamers, as an examples I would mention: Starcraft, and Starcraft 2.
Second problem is how to show to the publicity what is going on the screen. On PC it's fairly easy, we have almost unlimited computing power, so running background recording service is not a problem.

On mobile devices on the other hand, we need to solve issue of transmiting content of the screen to some bigger renderer.
And as far as I know there are no so well prepared games for torunaments like Starcraft is :).
Of course it's just a matter of time, till some Rovio will make sport edition of Angry Birds ;-)...

[khim]

Someone leaked April 1 letter too early?

Well, too bad.

Sure, mobile games are growing but it'll be years before traditional PC/console games will disappear… if it'll ever happen.

[lxt]

Anyone who actually watch any competitive video game KNOW this is a complete joke. It's like Olympic committee announcing Olympic will be for physical disabilities only. Paralympics are actually held in parallel with Olympics while last year 9 of 10 official WCG games are PC-based the last one is XBox.

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[Louis]

@lxt: I have always assumed that these competitions are to sell more games and game platforms, and the center of mass of these markets are both moving to iOS and Android.

[anobserver]

"the center of mass of these markets are both moving to iOS and Android."

which pinpoints an important change in the economics of the game industry. Traditionally, successful games (PC/gameboxes) require massive investments and development (lots of effort to have scenarios, photorealistic graphics, quality sounds, program optimizations, etc). They were also fairly expensive on those platforms to recoup that investment -- compared to what one pays on smartphones.

Anybody has a reference to an good analysis of the evolution of games economics/technology PC/gameboxes vs smartphones?

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Last year the contest was great. The guys who gathered there showed great skills.

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Great post Tomi!

Indeed almost everything can be done on mobile phones but I still prefer playing on PC/game consoles as it provides better gaming experience than the mobile provides.

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