Oh hello there. Fancy seeing you here. Is it Monday again? Doesn't time fly when you're alive and doing things to fill it? I suppose it's time to have a little bit of a musing then. A little bit of a think about one of the big things that's affecting mobile gaming right now.
And since we're in the run up to Christmas and the new year, I thought it'd be interesting to look at some of the big questions that we're going to be posing about mobile gaming in the coming 12 months.
A sort of where are we going and how are we going to get there kind of thing. I don't claim to have all of the answers, but I do claim to have three of the questions. And here they are, in an easy to digest list format.
What's going on with mobile VR?
A lot of us thought that 2016 was going to be the year of VR. But that's not really panned out. If anything the VR revolution has sort of stalled before it even got going, and we're none-the-wiser as to whether or not the tech is going to be the next big thing.
We've seen some developments, like Google's Daydream project and the rise of Gear VR, but we're still not riding the crest of the VR wave like we probably should be. The reasons for that are manifold, but I think the main one is the lack of standardisation.
Sure VR is cool, but it's also a bit of a faff to get working if you've got an older phone. Expect more and more developers to bundle together headsets and handsets in the next twelve months, and (whisper it) maybe we'll see Apple jumping in too.
Are eSports going to explode?
A lot of the money in the world of gaming at the moment is in eSports. And we've seen a number of developers and companies taking strides to create a similar ecosystem in the mobile world. Vainglory, I am looking at you.
But much like VR, there hasn't been a monumental shift in the way we play or consume on mobile, and that's something that's going to have to happen if mobile eSports are really going to capture the public's imagination.
What to expect in the next year? I think there's going to be more mobile games with a competitive, free to play focus. Clash Royale and Vainglory have paved the way, but expect a lot more big devs to be trying to grab a slice of the pie in 2017.
What happened to MFi?
The controller initiative from Apple seemed like a great idea at the time, but it's failed to really become anything more than a niche market, with just a handful of controllers out there and a pretty steep price point.
This ties in with the potential for VR though. Eye control is all well and good, but having something in your hands so you can play a VR game more comfortably and confidently could well be a huge deal breaker.
If 2017 really is going to be the year of VR, then expect Apple to come up with a new style of controller as well. And expect the mother big mobile companies to follow suit. Whoever controls the controllers is likely to control the VR space too.
