Posted December 31, 1969 by Adam Gainer

At E3 2005, we got a chance to interview Lisa Waits of SNAP Mobile, a division of Nokia about the future of mobile gaming and what else SNAP had in store for the future.

At E3 2005, I received the chance to interview Lisa Waits, head of SNAP mobile, which is Nokia?s mobile gaming division. We sat down to discuss the future of mobile gaming in America as well as the future of Snap mobile, including future plans for the mobile gaming world. We also discussed the differences between the European mobile gaming and the growing American community. Filled with a lot of different information about the mobile community and the future of mobile entertainment in America she had a wealth of information to share with us regarding where Nokia was headed.

Prior to E3, SNAP mobile had announced three new titles that they had planned to release before the end of 2005. Space Shooter,3d pool, and Age of Piracy were three subscription based MMOG?s that would be available for download later this year. These three games will have a feature of a global friends list which will allow gamers to message each other and communicate regardless of game type. This means that gamers who are engaged in a game of Pool can contact their friends playing another game and have constant communication. Lisa explained how SNAP was growing very wise to the Java mobile community. With over 600 million Java enabled phones in use throughout the planet, she explained how Nokia had contacted over 150 different cellular operators so that gamers could connect to each other across the globe regardless of carrier. She feels that if there is a much larger universal demand for mobile gaming that ultimately the consumer demand will reduce prices. She cites text messaging in America as an example, ?Just look at text messaging in America. Before American Idol it wasn?t that popular in the United States. Now because of such a high demand, the service has been driven down to as little as 3$ a month.?

The three games that SNAP announced are not the only titles that we will be seeing this year. Unconfirmed rumors of an RPG, sports, racing, strategy, and table top gaming were hinted at when I probed on future game developments. She told us that SNAP was really more interested into the more classic gaming elements which most people are familiar. She was highly eager to tell us about some of the different aspects of these games and their universal appeal to gamers. Explaining that most mobile gamers, including her self, loved to have games that were easy to learn and fun to play. She discussed that SNAP planned on releasing a lot of casual games for free to give away to different gamers. She also hinted as some ports of classic games that most would be familiar with to a mobile environment. Expanding upon some of the games and giving them some fresh newer game play elements would hit home to gamers who love to kill a few minutes during their day.

Lisa also went into detail of why the Mobile market is so different than any other gaming market. ?People respond differently to Mobile gaming, when you leave the house in the morning you might not go back for your PSP, but you certainly will go back for your cell phone?. Waits believes that their market will be the casual gamer with some quick time to kill and looking for something that is quick, fun and easy. She admits that their current audience in the mobile gaming world is older tech savvy males whom look for phones with certain technological capabilities. She hinted however that their audience is shifting to females. She discussed about how she feels that mobile games were perfect for women as they are quick to learn, and that women are usually more connected and around their phones more than men. She even went as far to say that they had a few titles targeted just to women in order to bring them into the market.

She talked about Java and it?s impressive capability for being a great development medium open for innovation. She discussed that it was extremely important that there is a support community for the mobile gaming industry. In one of their new games Space Shooter their will be a live moderator who will be changing the game while tricking gamers, or just not revealing all the various information. She also talked about gamers are the ultimate A.I. and truly know what gamers want. This is why she made the incredible announcement that SNAP plans on releasing a developer tool kit for Java enabled phones. She revealed that this would really boost the amount of games and different innovations at an incredible rate. Currently with only 10 titles, SNAP plans to grow to 25 by the end of the year. After the launch of the developer?s kit their title line up is expected to shoot well into the thousands. The development kit will allow programmers to come up with Java games and then send them to SNAP for certification. This means that there will be both developer and publisher support for almost every title.

The development kit announcement was a shocking technical announcement. Probing further I asked Lisa about the integration of Bluetooth technologies and the impact of Smart Phones on their mobile community. I asked her if they had any different ideas to take advantage of this continually growing technology. The ability to network your phone to your computer and share information between the two was something she expressed heavy interest in. ?Gamers hate losing their information and data when it comes to games. We?ve looked at using Bluetooth to be able to back up information between your phone and your computer.? I also asked her about sharing information between different users. She had discussed about how that was something else Nokia was still ?looking in to?. I was curious to see if there were any plans for LAN play via blue tooth and was told it was ?quite a possibility?. I had asked even further to see if Nokia had made any moves towards an ?on demand? type of media service, and was simply told, ?We can?t comment on that at this time?.