The Technology Stig

The smartphone market is undergoing an explosion of sorts with the fast paced growth of Android and Iphone platform.An increasing number of users, using these platforms are downloading applications via app stores at a scorching rate. Games are the most popular category of applications on these stores.The market for games is also witnessing an impressive growth with a large number of titles being added regularly. These games are typically single player games with a lot of them allowing the user to play along with AI(Artificial Intelligence) players generated by the game. In spite of the AI capabilities being reasonably good,they are unable to address the basic human tendency to compete with others including friends and contacts.Online games on social networking sites such as Facebook have shown us the importance users attach to playing and competing with their friends and contacts.There is a genuine need within consumers and game producers for realtime human multiplayer capabilities in their games.

But……

Game producers spend a considerable amount of time and effort in trying to develop exciting games.Their development skills are geared towards producing content on smart phones and smart devices(e.g the ipod touch). Any game producer looking to put realtime human multiplayer support in their games would require server side development skills and would also need to invest in setting up and supporting the infrastructure. A few game developers that do manage to set this up face a bigger hurdle,which is that of creating a user base ,large enough to support and sustain such a system.There is clearly a huge gap between their needs and their capabilities.

With the introduction of Game Center in iPhone OS 4 ,Apple has made an attempt to fill the void by creating an ecosystem, which will help support these game developers.They can now take their single player games and add multiplayer support to it.The system will take care of the end to end requirements of game developers, right from discovering players,inviting them for match-ups,transferring game data between players to publishing scores and maintaining leader-boards.

But…..

There are a couple of inherent weaknesses in Apple’s solution which Google can exploit if they play their cards right.The first drawback in Apple’s solution ,is that it only addresses the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch platform.It’s tough to argue on why this is the case, but it’s important to remember that Apple still just controls 15% of the smartphone market.Game producers don’t just stick to one platform,they produce Game titles for all popular platforms. Unlike Apple and in-spite of being the creator of the Android OS, Google can help create an ecosystem which can be used by game producers across all platforms.The second drawback in Apple’s solution,is that it still does not have a perfect solution to address the human need to compete with friends and contacts.Google can leverage on it’s existing Google talk and GMail infrastructure to build a network where a user can easily compete with his friends and contacts.

If Google can pull this one off, it will succeed in creating an open and thriving ecosystem where there is no restriction on game producers and everyone enjoys a level playing field.And with this ,Google can literally take the ‘Game’ to Apple .