Platforms Hike Restrictions on Game Developers as Competition Heats Up

RealNetworks’ Gamehouse division is “just starting to wrestle with the concept of being a cross-platform developer,” as opposed to multiplatform, and designing games that, say, keep users’ scores synced between Web and mobile play using Facebook Connect, said Vice President of Studios Ken Murphy. Massively Fun, which makes a massively multiplayer crossword game, is moving into mobile as “a way to draw people back” in situations where “a Mac or a PC might not be accessible,” said CEO Grant Goodale. The cross-platform mentality has only recently started to change how games are developed, with tablets seen as the new holy grail, said Pat Wylie, vice president of studios at Big Fish Games.

The real opportunity lies in Android and iOS distribution, not social or other platforms like Xbox Live Arcade, said Todd Hooper, CEO of Zipline Games. The blockbuster title Halo took a decade to gross $2 billion but “Zynga’s done that in two years,” representing a “big transition” away from traditional gaming and a diminished opportunity for social challengers, he said. Social can’t be dismissed, Murphy countered, with 300 million players on Facebook alone: “There’s so much fertile ground in these spaces,” even if mobile has more opportunity. Hooper said consoles and handhelds have fully “matured” and it’s not worth competing: “Show me a developer who got rich on Nintendo’s platform.” Freemium is where the dollars are going, he said: Even 5 percent of customers paying can translate to a profitable title.

Making a cross-platform title means accepting technical limitations, executives said. Developers need to “find the lowest common denominator that doesn’t piss everybody off,” so that gameplay is consistent between players competing on different hardware on a data network and Wi-Fi, Goodale said: It would require degraded sound and graphics for a first-person shooter, for example. “The key is to pick your battles” with the player base. That’s why Massively Fun specializes in “wordplay” games that have lower performance expectations, he said. The lowest common denominator is “one of the biggest headaches,” Murphy said. Zynga’s new Words with Friends game is truly cross-platform but “it’s not like it requires enormous amounts of processing power,” he said. A popular solution for developers is making “companion apps” that give players “bits and pieces and chunks of play” from their fully-fledged games on more-limited platforms, Murphy said.

HP’s discontinuation of WebOS disappointed at least one developer: Wylie said it was his favorite platform because “it literally took hours” to port a Big Fish game to WebOS. HTML5 may not be the savior of developers as thought, Goodale said: Though it’s “extremely easy to get your code out there,” game engines do a better job with development. And while app stores have created some “universality” and reduced the cost of getting users, “you're going to pay 30 percent” to reduce that “setup friction,” Murphy said.

"The degree to which the channel partners don’t play nice with each other” often determines how difficult it will be for developers to make cross-platform games, Murphy said. “The channel partners do not have their interests fully aligned.” Apple, for example, only accepts game payments through its own mechanisms, and Google is reportedly “pushing back” on developers using payment options other than its Checkout in Android games, Hooper said. Good luck getting a game into Amazon’s Appstore for Android that doesn’t use Amazon and its giant credit card database for payment, he added. Goodale said the platforms aren’t doing anything “particularly draconian,” but they aren’t necessarily helping developers with “discoverability” either.

Apple’s response to privacy lawsuits alleging abuse of the Universal Device ID (UDID) -- new iOS 5 documentation that tells developers their UDID access will be “deprecated” -- worried executives. Mobile ads, in-app purchases and other monetization mechanisms all depend on UDID, Hooper said. “Some very ambitious lawyers” decided the use of UDID counted as the newly-feared “supercookie” that can’t be deleted, and fearing closer scrutiny from European regulators, Apple is pulling the plug, he said: But “you know what’s going to happen. Apple’s not going to deny themselves” access to UDID for their own features. Especially for microtransaction games in which players build up entitlements over a year or more, “you can’t restore that experience for them” once UDID is taken off the table, Murphy said. Apple’s restriction “makes it tougher to break out of any vertically-integrated ecosystem,” he said. RealNetworks is caught in a similar fight between Facebook and Google+, he added: “It’s a massive inhibitor” to cross-platform games.

Features on the horizon include tablets that have “console abilities” and gameplay on 1080p TV sets, Hooper said. Going through set-top boxes makes sense, he said, noting such a demo for PopCap’s Plants vs. Zombies at the recent Casual Connect conference in Seattle. Set tops reach a market without consoles and billing relationships are already established, he said. That was likely a factor in Google’s purchase of Motorola Mobility, Wylie said. Murphy said the “componentization” of devices would take off in the next five years, with mobile phones used as controllers for games on TVs.

What’s unlikely to happen is a “buy once, play anywhere” model for games. It’s the “natural extension” of freemium games, whose developers want the same currency to be used across platforms, Goodale said. But developers would need “account consistency” across platforms, a tall order, Murphy said. Consumers have long paid for the same content again when new media debut, such as DVDs and then Blu-ray, Hooper said: “That’s a lot of work to do for a pretty small amount of customer satisfaction.”