Microsoft Joins Electronic Arts to Prepare Cell Phone Game Rules
February 12th, 2006
Microsoft is teaming up with video game producers such as Electronic Arts to create standards and rules for games that are played on cell phones. The standards will also be developed for other mobile devices example PDAs.
According to Microsoft, the company plans to prepare an initial set of rules and standards by the 2nd quarter of 2006. Other firms cooperating with Microsoft include Samsung, Texas Instruments, Nokia.
By developing these standards, cell phone game developers will be able to reduce costs considerably because they will only develop one type of a game that works across all mobile devices. Instead of designing 200 games for 200 different devices all using different hardware/software configurations, the developer will have to produce only 1 game.
Paul-Jon McNealy, an analyst at American Technology Research quotes, "The structure for developing content for mobile platforms is heavily fragmented, so there is a need. Standards bodies are usually very challenged to get things passed - everyone has an agenda."
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