Yesterday a customer asked me “What advantage does the bandwidth of new 3G networks bring to mobile games?” My answer: None. Huh?

It's not quite true. The extra bandwidth does provide for larger games. Consumers are willing to wait for only so long before their game arrives, and the extra bandwidth will allow for larger downloads in the same amount of time. The new 3G phones also have larger memory capabilities for the games.

The reality is that multiplayer games is all about latency, not bandwidth. Games are optimized to send the minimal amount of information to communicate game state. For real time multiplayer games, the key is in how many messages per second can be processed by the game. Even with broadband connections, the variability of how a packet travels through the internet ether means that consistent latency is always a problem. And, the latency on a 3G network still has a long ways to go.

We will still see mobile multiplayer games using lots of clever networking tricks. Community based games will be the thing that drives the mass market explosion that is waiting to happen. Here is an example of someone that gets it.