Molyneux: Mobile games are "clunky"
Lionhead boss is unimpressed with handset ergonomics, but thinks the future could be bright
Peter Molyneux, head of development studio Lionhead, has told GamesIndustry.biz that he thinks that mobile games at the moment are, on the whole, "clunky."
In an exclusive interview looking back at the first decade of Lionhead, he cited a number of reasons for their current failings.
"It's down to some very simple things - these clicky buttons are useless for playing games, and it's down to some other stuff, display drivers and hardware chips obviously. But even if you had simple buttons that would help a lot."
However, he does feel that they'll have a part to play in the future of gaming.
"There's no doubt in my mind that we will be playing more games on mobile devices. What those mobile devices will be, and what they're capable of is still very much up for grabs."
"They're changing as fast as the early computer games industry changed, if not faster. My one wish for that is that mobile phones were made with some sympathy for games to be played on them, because they're not, and that must be immensely frustrating for people developing for them."
Molyneux went on to question the current design ethic for mobile games, and whether or not the industry sees them in the right light.
"I think this is another thing where we're, as an industry, not looking at the problem and saying 'How can we make something that appeals to those people?'"
"At the moment we're making Tetris, and we want to saying 'What am I doing? I've got a mobile phone. Should I be feeling like I'm playing all the time, or should I be loading up Java?'"
Lionhead CTO Tim Rance also revealed that utilising the mobile phone platform was something that the company had looked into in the past.
"We had a brilliant idea for mobile for The Movies, which was about streaming them to people's mobile phones, so if you have a moment and you don't know what to do, forget the problem about buttons, it's just a viewing device."