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In-Fusio brings games to mobile phones
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(IDG) -- Because of the dearth of games for mobile phones, Nokia's simple "Snake" has slithered to the top of the small heap. French mobile phone gaming company In-Fusio hopes to change that when it launches technology allowing users to download new games directly to the handset.
"This will be a virtual machine that sits in the phone," Giles Corbett, managing director of In-Fusio, said. The engine will allow users to store between 20 and 100 games in a mobile phone's flash memory.
In-Fusio is currently working on ExEn (execution engine) technology with four handset manufacturers and aims to have ExEn-enabled handsets on the shelves in the first quarter of next year.
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The 2-year-old company already has embedded games, and WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) games are currently available from operators in Germany, Hong Kong, France, Australia and Spain.
"Right now, our Pac Man-type game is the most popular," Corbett said.
With the current crop of embedded games, users access the first five levels free, with each additional level costing the price of sending a text message to request it, which is around .15 euros (13 US cents), depending on the operator. With ExEn technology, the full games will cost users between 2 and 10 euros to download, Corbett said.
The company is also making a push into the U.S. market, Corbett said, but has run into difficulties because the American mind set runs contrary to the European one. "The games are made to run on the phone with the PC as a backup, (but) in the U.S., they want the PC to run the games, with the phone as a backup," Corbett said.
In-Fusio is also designing games to use the Bluetooth wireless standard. "We want to use the network for long-distance multi-player games, and Bluetooth for short-distance multi-player games," he said.
Although the graphics on the games are much more detailed than "Snake," the company did take a lesson from it: keep the game play simple. "Snake is not the only game on the Nokia handsets, but it's the most popular because you don't need to read the directions, you just play it," Corbett said.
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