F5 Games blog

Welcome to Part 2 of my ‘future of mobile gaming’ series. Last week I laid out my argument for mobile phone gaming as the future of all mobile gaming, and hinted that in part 2 I was going to also tackle the home console market. If you didn’t read the first part you may want to check it out as I’m just going to dive right in.

Mobile Gaming at Home

In the first part of this piece I stated that the advantages of smartphone gaming; such as the rapid progress of mobile phone technology, the ‘good enough’ gaming of smartphones, and the exploding market size, have allowed smartphones to replace portable gaming devices as the future of mobile gaming. While that is perhaps heretical to some people it isn’t all that difficult of a determination to make. What is far more interesting, I believe, is the idea that the same advantages smartphones hold over portable gaming consoles could also lead to a future where the home console is rendered obsolete by the smartphone.

This view, that smartphones will replace home gaming consoles like the Xbox 360 and PS3, is not something you hear about very often and I think that stems from a couple of mental hurdles that people have to jump in order to accept the argument.

The Hardware Problem

The most obvious reason this is hard to believe is the current difference in processing and graphical power between smartphones and game consoles. It’s hard to imagine that your phone could deliver the same level of visceral game experience, running at 60 frames per second, on your 1080p HDTV that your Xbox can accomplish but it’s not as far off as you may think. We already discussed how the smartphone industry was on such a fast product refresh cycle that the hardware gap between phones and dedicated gaming devices is closing every month. So it’s easy to think that if you just wait long enough the graphical power of an Xbox or PS3 will shrink down and find it’s way into your phone, but that’s not the real story. The real reason that smartphones will quickly move up to fill the role of home gaming consoles is parallelization, or multi-core chips.

Recently, at Mobile World Congress 2011, Nvidia revealed their newest mobile chipset codenamed ‘Kal-El’. This mobile processor, designed for smartphones and tablets, is not only a technological monster, it’s a quad-core chip. This chip, which is planned to hit in products before the end of the year, enables not just 1080p video but 1440p, it has support for 3D video, and it has a 12 core Geforce GPU that will run circles around just about every existing mobile graphics chip on the market. Never content to rest on their heels, Nvidia also showed their roadmap for Tegra over the next few years which displays even larger performance enhancements coming on yearly cycles all the way through 2014.

And Nvidia isn’t the only game in town. The level of technological competition in the mobile processor and graphics space is amazing and it’s happening, in large part, due to the addition of multiple cores. By continuing to add multiple cores to mobile chips manufacturers like Nvidia can continue to radically increase the performance and capabilities of mobile devices, nearly every 12 months.

So, if you’ll accept that we will very quickly have mobile phones, and tablets, with graphical horsepower which comes close to the current crop of home consoles then we’re having the same argument we had last week; can a dedicated gaming device keep up with the rapid advancement of the mobile space when mobile devices will offer an experience that is nearly as good, at a lower price, which does far more than just play games, and that will be updated on a yearly basis? I say no.

The Power of the Dock

The second reason it’s hard to think of your smartphone as a home gaming console is precisely because we’re talking about a phone. A phone is something you take with you on the go, it’s something you keep in your pocket and a device that you have a very personal connection with. Game consoles, however, are something that you bring home from the store, stick under your TV, and then sit down in front of when you want to relax and escape into another world. For the last 25 years, even with all the technological advancement, game consoles have stayed the same in one very important way; they plug into your TV and collect dust for 80%-90% of the day.

One of the main reasons I was able to look past this ‘game console’ concept and see smartphones as the future of gaming was the reveal of the Motorola Atrix 4G. If you aren’t familiar with the Atrix check out the video below to see why, especially the last minute of the video.

The Atrix allows you to dock your smartphone with either a laptop dock or an HD dock and unlock additional features. For this example I’m mainly interested in the HD dock that was shown at the end of the video. When the Atrix is docked in the HD dock and connected to an HDTV it displays a media viewer that isn’t unlike the Sony XMB UI on the PSP and PS3. The dock stays connected to your HDTV at all times and when your phone is connected it offers a hassle free gateway to your home theatre, that is the future of smartphone gaming in the home. The ability to connect your device, either through a dock or wirelessly, with your home theatre and expand your gaming experience at home is what will bring ‘hardcore’ gamers over to smartphone gaming at the expense of the dedicated consoles.

And the Dock doesn’t just have to be a dumb hub waiting for it’s brain to be plugged in. All of the media streaming functionalities that home consoles provide could be included in the hub itself and used when there is no phone plugged in at all. You could still stream movies, and music, and pictures, still watch Netflix and listen to Internet Radio all without needing to dock anything. Then when you plug in your phone you can tap into all that extra power for gaming and 3D movies, and video conferencing, the list goes on and on. Anything that you can do with a current home console you’ll be able to do with a smartphone and an HD dock in the next couple years.

The Future

Imagine a near future where you bring home your new smartphone with 4, or maybe 8, processor cores and a multi-core graphics chip and you dock it with your HDTV. Beyond just providing a new media browsing interface the dock also connects your phone to a power source so it can really crank up the performance and not worry about battery life. That could mean that some of the cores on your phone only activate when docked, or just that the phone overclocks into a performance mode and offers better graphics, sound, and AI when it’s connected to your home system. The dock also acts as a hub for your wireless gamepads, so you can kick your feet up on the couch and start playing your favorite first person shooter, online with your friends. When a call comes in, or you get a text, you can see a little alert in the upper corner of the screen and either accept the call or ignore it until later. If you choose to take the call it could transmit it to your bluetooth headset while you continue to rack up kills in Call of Duty 6. When you’re done gaming you still have access to all of the features of your smartphone, just through a larger screen. You can watch movies, listen to music, check your email, send a tweet, etc. etc. And when you’re done you just pick up your phone and walk away, and you don’t have to leave $400 worth of gaming technology sitting on a shelf not being used 90% of the time.

So there it is, my vision of the future of mobile, and possibly all, gaming. This doesn’t mean that the dedicated home console will go away completely, just like PC gaming hasn’t gone away, but I believe the future of mainstream gaming will look something like this, with game studios developing games for smartphones that are played on the go and at home seamlessly, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it! Let me know what you think in the comments.