Mobile gaming: the crusade of Flashlite
When the first Flashlite phones came out here in Japan in 2004, most mobile game developers just gave it a merciful smile. Sure not a true competitor in terms of technology and market share compared to for all those thousand of java powered mobile games in the market.
Over 80% of handsets support Flashlite
Looking at what mobile Flash was capable of at that time they might have been right. But time and technology has moved on. By the end of 2007 over 80% of all handset models could run mobile Flash applications and also mobile Flash evolved into a more powerful technology getting closer and closer to its PC based counterpart. DoCoMo in late 2007 launched its first mobile handset series which supports Flashlite 3.0, opening up the mobile platform to a wide range of rich media service.
It beats Java
Most of all mobile Flash has some very important benefits: compared to java, it is rather easy to develop applications for it. (It got easier with each version upgrade) And it can run on a wide set of handsets without the need to adapt it to specific handset models (a big cost factor for java based applications).
MobileGameTown from DeNA, one of Japans most successful mobile services with close to 7 million users relies fully on mobile Flash technology and offers hundreds of free mobile games.
Others get scared
The boom of mobile Flash games even created the first counter measures from the carriers: KDDI au one, Japans second biggest carrier, recently forbid official sites to feature free mobile Flash games as they were afraid it could kill au’s mobile game revenues. (Most of the paid games are using java or BREW technology).
