I'd like to pick up on some ideas that came out of a panel from E3 this year, called "Massively Cross-Platform Games," which I found via Gamasutra.
One of the bigger issues facing cross-platform support is the difference in system specs and controllers. Ichiro Otobe, Chief Strategist for Square Enix, said that [...] the solution may be assigning different gameplay tasks in the game world to different systems: "What if the person on the console is the pilot, and not the foot soldier? [We need to] tailor the gameplay more specifically for the console itself."
Mr. Otobe: "I have a 360 in my office, a PS2 in my den, and when on business trips I play games on my notebook. Crossplatforming is also about allowing one person to access the same game world from different locations and situations."
Otobe summarizes nicely two of the primary motivations for cross-platform play. First, friends may have access to different platforms, but still want to play with each other. Second, consumers may have access to multiple platforms and want to play from whichever is the most convenient at the moment. Actually, both motivations boil down to the same thing: if I like a game, I want to be able to access it when, where, and how I want it. My thinking about extending existing PC MMOs to mobile phones generally falls into the second category, though, of giving consumers access to the game from whichever platform is most convenient at the moment. It's certainly easy to think about players who only play the game from their PC, but would there ever be players who only play from mobile? Possible, but harder to envision because it's further from what we see today. I'll take a guess, though.
We already have people playing MMOs on PCs, obviously. They frequently have more than one character and use higher-level characters to help lower ones by providing equipment, social networks, etc. We also already have people playing MMOs on mobile devices. I'm less familiar with this space, so I'm not sure whether players frequently have multiple characters. Still, we can envision a player who has one or more characters on the PC and one or more mobile characters, and that each category of characters has strengths and weaknesses. So, maybe only mobile characters can fly, or only mobiles are small enough to fit into tight spaces, or only mobiles can buy or produce potions of teleportation but they can then pass those potions back to PC characters. Maybe because of the complementary skills, guilds must have mobiles and PC characters, just like needing tanks and healers. In this scenario, it's easy to see that some players may go entirely mobile while others may stick entirely with the PC. A significant percentage would probably play both, though.
I don't like the idea of
I don't like the idea of playing with people on different, especially mobile, devices. Say I'm playing a character on a PC and trying to complete an objective that requires the aid of others. It would be really frustrating if the person I'm working with suddenly disappeared from the game world because she turned off her mobile phone because she's boarding a plane or something.
Since it's so easy for a mobile gamer to just "turn it off", characters controlled by such a device will never be as complete as a character controlled by a stationary system. Thus I feel that few people will find value in create a charater that's controlled by the mobile system.