Top industry CEOs weigh in on the cell phone MMO debate

It's more a case of their current offerings do not fit the mobile model, it's certainly not the case that people don't want some sort of standalone cell phone MMO, it's such a huge potential market given the readiness to hand of this platform, over it's notebook and desktop counterpart.

The first people who get the right balance between interactivity, fun, scalability and community will have a property on their hands as big as Facebook. Problem is, no one has figured that balance out yet and so studio's are happy for them to be some sort of auxillary to a PC platform, which is probably the first step towards this.

It's not your WoW or LoTRO, it's something different, something that exploits the fact you can do things on the go but careful to avoid gimmicks (as from what I've seen mobile development suffers this terribly).

The questions I ask are, do MMMO (mobile MMO) players need to run through a world in 3D, do they need to read when audio streaming is now prevalent, do they need to even fight and level and group, probably not? It's more of taking a community portal type site and giving it goals and a purpose and making it fun, sticking the right branding on it.

I'd like to see what these companies come up with, but I feel like it will probably be horribly underwhelming, so a chance for a small studio to get a foot in the door and corner the market. In 2-3 years time, with the onset of new technologies, that same opportunity will not be there, so I figure that a lot of companies are just waiting until the tech is better aligned with what they have now, rather than reinvent the wheel.