Mobile Game Conference 2006: Designing for Mobile Multiplayer

Seattle, July 13 - Here are my notes from the roundtable moderated today by Steve Meretzky. Audience size: 70-100. First, here's the description of the session from the official program:

Roundtable One: Designing for Mobile Multiplayer
In this interactive session, developers, publishers and designers can hash through the various approaches to connecting mobile gamers together in a shared world. Participants will leave with new approaches to this challenging, but increasingly important, aspect of mobile games.
- Steve Meretzky, Chief Game Designer, Floodgate

Here are Meretzky's notes that he used to start off the roundtable conversation. There are no errors in transcription here, because he e-mailed them to me after the session.

Advantages of Multiplayer

• Phones are perhaps the most suitable platform for multiplayer; all phones are already connected by a network; not everyone who buys a phone does so to play games, but everyone who buys a phone does so to interact with other people
• The social aspects of multiplayer gaming make for a richer gameworld
• Real players make better opponents than AI opponents
• Players will pay more and pay longer for a multiplayer experience, and the billing systems for a subscription are already in place; no need in get player to provide a credit card which is always a large point of resistance
• Players in a community act as viral marketeers for the game
• It's just cooler, dammit

Disadvantages of Multiplayer

• There's no tried and true path to follow for multiplayer mobile game development, as there is for single-player game development
• More complexity translates to higher dev costs and longer dev cycles
• There are higher post-launch costs (servers, customer support)
• Publishers are not convinced that multiplayer is worth the additional cost/hassle
• Carriers are less familiar with and comfortable with multiplayer games
• Latency of mobile networks is higher than for Web-based multiplayer games
• With the wide capabilities of different handsets, it's hard to create a level playing field for players on two disparate handsets

The Spectrum of Multiplayer Mobile Games

• Posting a high-score to a global leaderboard
• Tournament model, comparing high scores in a game to compete for a prize
• Interaction with another player's “game product” without the involvement of that player
  • e.g. Pocket Kingdom on the N-Gage, encountering other players forts and armies
  • e.g. Mo-Pets – choose an opponent from an online database of other pets; compete against that pet's “stats”, without any participation by that pet's owner
• Two-player turn-based (e.g. chess, billiards)
• Two-player real-time via phone network (e.g. Bejeweled 2)
• Two-player real-time via Bluetooth – advantage is not having lag (e.g. Bluetooth Biplanes, N-Gage Snakes)
• 2-Player real-time multiplayer (e.g. Pirates of the Caribbean Multiplayer)
• Massively multiplayer online (e.g. Ultima Online mobile and Samurai Romanesque in Japan )
• Location-based component (e.g. Mogi, a Japanese game where players pick up and trade virtual items with other nearby players. There is also a Web-based piece, where other players can see the locations of items and “direct” their mobile-based partners toward rare items.)

Here are my notes. I was recording the conversation longhand, so I haven't captured most speaker identities and everything is paraphrased. When more than one person said the same thing, I consolidated into one sentence. Here we go:

Meretzky's main questions for the roundtable:
Why is mobile multiplayer important?
Why is mobile multiplayer tough?
What's already been done in mobile multiplayer?

Meretzky read his notes from above here.

Meretzky concluded his introduction by starting off with the first two questions:
Is mobile multiplayer worthwhile?
What are new uses for mobile multiplayer?

Jason Altman of Longtail Studios : When people are doing mobile multiplayer, are they mostly thinking about asynchronous or real-time?

Justin Hall: Asynchronous. That way we can do lots of simultaneous sessions using SMS to relay moves.

Anonymous: The latency is too much for real-time multiplayer. The best you can hope to do is send interrupts to other players.

Anonymous: Poker Hold'em was successful.

Meretzky: With Pirates of the Caribbean , we discovered that latency was less of an issue than we expected. Usually between 500 and 1000 ms.

Anonymous: How many in the audience have worked on mobile multiplayer games? (About 1/3 raise hands) How many have worked on mobile MMOs? (About 1/10 raise hands)

Justin Davis of MODOJO : It's getting to the point that mobile games must have multiplayer. I played a solo version of Othello/Reversi the other day and was just disappointed when I couldn't play it with friends, even on the same phone. As a reviewer, I can't give a top score to a game without a multiplayer component.

Anonymous: Our company planned for a racing game with an editor and the publisher threw out the editor due to lag.

Anonymous: Meretzky, I'm surprised to hear you've gotten sub 1-second lag with Pirates.

Anonymous: Multiplayer games make much more money. We can use this to convince publishers to invest in them.

Anonymous: Some developers are crossing the line to self-publishers and are more cautious during this transition period. I'd be interested to see a tokens subscription service, where players pay $5.99 a month to buy tokens they can then use to buy games. Soon, I can see games allowing players to spend the tokens within the game on additional content.

Anonymous: Games should be subscription based.

Anonymous: I like the mixed model -- subscription and purchase options available.

Anonymous: From the carrier's perspective, multiplayer means subscription. One-time purchases can work if there are additional micropayments down the line for more content.

Anonymous: Wild Tangent has Wild Coins. Players earn free games through advanced activity.

Anonymous: Episodic content is good for subscriptions. You can't charge a subscription for just multiplayer, unless there is an ongoing stream of additional content.

Anonymous: We need to do a better job of managing launches for multiplayer games. Before the multiplayer community matures around our games, there may be times when players log in and can't find anyone to compete against. I've heard of some companies hiring people to play on multiplayer around launch before the community develops.

Anonymous: You can use AI in multiplayer if no actual players are on, but you have to make sure to tell the player that they're playing against AI. You don't want players second-guessing when they actually are playing against real people.

Anonymous: The mobile version of GoPets has a business model for item purchases within the game. The mobile version is also connected to the PC version, so you can interact with the same pet whether you're on your PC or your phone.

Anonymous: Carriers will shut down developers if they go outside of the network for billing.

Anonymous: You see more micropayments on PC MMOs without subscriptions. So far, these are PC-only, but it's transitioning to mobile. SMS payments are more secure than credit cards.

Anonymous: Subscriptions are intuitive. With micropayments, users might buy items and then be surprised when those purchases show up on their bills.

Anonymous: You can't try to hide charges -- users will find out.

Anonymous: You can hide charges because players are not always the ones who pay the bills.

Anonymous: When one carrier decided to cancel the game subscriptions of phones it knew were inactive, it lost 30% of its subscribers. There is such an economic incentive to have hidden charges, but as an industry we can't build distrust with our customers.

Anonymous: What's the micro payment range people are thinking about? 50c? $1?

Meretzky: Based on my experience at WorldWinner, up to $1, people don't even think. After that point though, there's increasing resistance as price goes up.

Anonymous: You can charge more for content that affects gameplay then you can for something that's just a cosmetic change.

Anonymous: I want better P2P game sharing. I'm not talking about piracy, but if I'm playing a game and a friend sees me play it and likes the game and wants it on his phone, we need to have an easy way to share it. Bluetooth? Web download? Carrier deck purchase?