Opinion: Please, no more talk of Xbox 360 graphics on mobile phones

by Stuart Dredge

Hey, apparently our phones will soon be capable of Xbox 360 quality visuals. It's true, we read it in this story on Electronics Weekly.

To be specific, processor firm AMD has licensed its Unified Shader Architecture to Qualcomm for use in the latter's Mobile Station Model chipset for mobile handsets. That's the same technology that's used for Xbox 360, see.

The predictable spin on the news is 'Xbox 360 graphics in mobiles'. Eye-catching, clearly, but this is bad news for the wider mobile gaming industry, for a couple of obvious reasons.

First, it can only encourage (or at least reinforce) the belief amongst many developers that they can shovelport console games onto mobile, now the platform is finally up to the task technically.

However, it ignores the plain fact that while mobiles may soon have console-quality graphical processors, they won't have console-style joypads. Halo 3 on a phone? Woo! Halo 3 played with a phone keypad? Gah!

Second, there's storage issues. Xbox 360 games come on DVD-ROMs with 7GB of available space. Good luck squeezing that onto your handset. (Yes, there are 8GB music mobiles available, but that still only leaves room for one game and very little else.)

Now, both these issues are solvable, of course. Games' control systems can be redesigned to work better on a mobile keypad, and new accessories like the ZeeMote might help. Meanwhile, streaming games dynamically over the network reduces the storage problems – and is something Qualcomm already does with its BREW mobile gaming platform.

But the point is, whenever someone writes a story about mobiles getting console quality graphics, the implication is that essentially mobile games have been rubbish until now – a time when they can finally get 'proper' games with super 3D graphics, and us journalists can start nerding over textures and light-shading and resolution like our Xbox 360 equivalents.

Mobile games don't have to ape console games. Focusing so much on 3D number-crunching ignores other aspects, like mobility and community, which are as important (if not more) to the future of mobile gaming.

This isn't a rant about Qualcomm, incidentally, who from many previous interviews has shown that it understands this point well. And there's plenty of ambitious, innovative mobile developers out there who'll take advantage of the increased visual power to create great mobile games, not console knock-offs.

In short, then: The mobile games industry doesn't need to get into a willy-waving contest with other gaming platforms, because it can only lose out by comparison. It's not just about saying mobile is as good as console – the focus should surely be on stressing how it's different.

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