Siemens, Motorola and Ericsson have announced they will work together in an industry initiative to develop a common standard for online gaming over cellphones, an industry expected to boom as mobile data speeds increase.
The companies say they will formally launch the initiative later this year with the object of developing a universal mobile games platform, the lack of which they believe is holding back development in the market.
The vendors hope to drive the adoption of pricey mobile data infrastructure through pressure on operators by consumers to allow access to the fruits of developers` labour. General adoption of online gaming would also drive the adoption of next-generation handsets.
The initial focus will be on developing application programming interfaces and a software development kit, both of which is hoped to be available by the third quarter of this year. Other vendors, game developers and mobile operators are to be invited to join the group once it is officially launched.
"We`re seeing that developers of mobile games are resorting to writing their own platforms or having to multiply the efforts to support many platforms," says Tim Krauskopfof, GM of core solutions for Motorola`s Internet software and content group. "As a result, costs are increasing and distribution options are limited."
The vendors have already agreed to use the CodeWarrio integrated development environment from Metrowerks, which is used in development for the PlayStation 2 and Palm OS, among others.
Ericsson is also developing a system to optimise the network use for online gaming on an operator level. The system allows developers to assign priority levels to game objects so that priority data is not lost if the bandwidth available to a user decreases suddenly.
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