Gaming on Windows Phone 7 Series
Wow, Monday Microsoft announced the Windows Phone 7 Series at Mobile World Congress. After digging through all this great info it really has me excited about the future of our platform. One of the things that has always been very personal to me is gaming on mobile devices, in fact it’s one of the things that led me to work at Microsoft. With the announcement that Windows Phone 7 Series phones will support Xbox LIVE features, consumers will have a first class gaming experience on their phones! It’s another great step showing Microsoft is taking gaming very seriously!
Traditionally Windows Mobile has had some great games, but not a really strong investment around game development and game design when it comes to a mobile platform. You’ve had technologies like GAPI and Managed Direct3D Mobile, but I feel more investment could be made to make partners successful and profitable as a game developer.
For myself, the introduction of Windows Phone 7 Series showing that Microsoft has taken a new approach to providing consumers a truly personal experience on a mobile device. As time goes on everyone on the Windows Phone and Xbox LIVE teams are working to make sure that you can leverage a powerful, productive and portable platform for your games.
I’m hoping that we’ll have some great conversations around game development and game design in a mobile form factor. So let’s start a dialog, whether it be on this blog or twitter (@mklucher). Pardon the pun, but this is a whole new game!
As long as there’s an easy way to get indie games to gamers I’ll be happy!
Though I haven’t seen anything official, I don’t think its a long stretch to assume that XNA will be the game dev framework of choice for Windows Phone 7. That would defiantely be awesome. My hope is that games developed for wp7 will also be compatible with zunehd, and that the two platforms will merge somewhat.
Ely, I think that is a safe bet as well. My assumption has been that the two will share some common framework so that maybe developers could start developing immediately after Mix against a ZuneHD so that when Windows Phone 7 devices launch they will have a well tested library of apps – at least that is my hope.
That said, I am also hoping that there is some story for Silverlight based games (or WPF) since Silverlight has been touted as a platform for gaming on the web.. i would love to port a few of my Silverlight apps over and put them in the store instead of just having them in a browser, but i guess we will find out soon enough.. either way, im stoked about WP7
Hey Mike, will mobile games require an XBox live gold account to be played online? If so, I could see that being a big hurdle for several people not wanting to pay $50 dollars a year to pay $1 for a game they may only play for 10 minutes.