Slashdot Mirror
The Mixed Outlook for iPhone Gaming
With everyone talking about Apple's big announcement, it's unsurprising that commentators are discussing the possibilities of gaming on the iPhone. The DS and the PSP are both on N'Gai Croal's list of who is afraid of the iPhone, and with good reason. Touchscreen gaming on a high-resolution screen? Sounds like fun. TIME's lengthy run-down on the iPhone even mentions the possibilities of games on the small screen. Just the same, it's not all roses: Kotaku talks about the developer unfriendly nature of the platform, and how that could throw up barriers to the first game on the handheld.
You can't USE the damn thing for anything beyond what Steve envisions.
There will be no free games for the iPhone, and the pay ones will all cost way more than they are worth.
All of the potential of OSX and Cocoa will be locked up in the Apple ivory tower. GG, Steve. GG.
+++ATH0
While it looks like the iPhone has all the hardware required to make a pretty slick mobile gaming platform, one gets the distinct impression that this just isn't in the cards. If users can't install software then the only games for the iPhone will have to come pre-installed, which pretty much obliterates the possibility of there ever being more than a handful of iPhone games. No third-party software means that what few games there are will all be made by Apple itself, which isn't good news. Apple is many great things, but game developer isn't one of them.
If Jobs sticks to his guns then this really is a lost opportunity for Apple. The iPhone's multiple point touch-screen and accellerometer could have made for a highly innovative portable gaming device even if the iPhone doesn't have the graphics hardware to keep up with other portable gaming devices, similar to how the Wii is highly innovative despite it's lack of cutting edge graphics. Apple could have had *FOUR* great devices in one package instead of just three. I'm sure the iPhone will be hacked and some amateur games will be produced for it, but that's not nearly enough to bring out the fourth latent "killer app" the iPhone could have had.
All this device integration is useless. A decent phone (free w/contract), camera ($100) and DS ($130) will do each job better than the iPhone. That's not the point obviously. The iPhone has all of this integrated, but we're talking gaming here. No photographer would decide which cellphone to use as a replacement for their camera, and neither should a gamer. It is inevitable that 5-15 years in the future we will finally have a gaming platform that also happens to be a phone. And then there will be a game that will be great, and you will need that platform to play it. A portable singularity, if you will. But that time is not now, and this is like discussing the Outlook of iPhone Photography. (i.e. Silly).
Certainly from an enthusiast's point of view it would be great if the iPhone was an open platform so you could port Game XYZ to it, but even that isn't the case.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
for now, mobile games are going to continue sticking with the 'little' apps - solitaire, poker, tetris, things like that. While there are some hack-n-slash games out there, I suspect that they don't do as well as the developers would like, especially compared to low commitment games like the above mentioned.
I'm pretty sure the industry is keenly aware and waiting for the day the market for online games to begin showing up on mobile devices. But the tech still isn't there yet. I can't imagine latency over the cellphone being considered a cheap commodity. So things that require twitch gaming (fighters, racers, rogues, co-op shooters) would be unplayable in a mobile online environment. Plus imagine the battery life? How long do you think you can play before your cell phone dies?
The first thing mentioned when my coworkers and I saw the iphone widescreen was, "dude, can you imagine games on that thing?" But what kind of games can you really play? I'm gonna need tactile feedback, flexible controls, and quick reaction time (framerate or latency) in addition to the nice graphics and sound. And considering the price of the device itself, mass market is not really an option, as nobody is going to buy this thing for their children. Remember rpgs for the palm? They did good enough for the 1-man developer, but it wasn't enough to begin to drive an industry to that direction.
iphone gaming isn't goign to make anybody rich - well, that's not true. It will make _somebody_ rich.
Untill something happens with phone companies where bandwidth and latency become dirt dirt cheap, I say the future is still in (currently) wifi gaming. The DS (and the PSP too!) still have a huge potential in that field. A pokemon MMO on the DS or Final Fantasy Online for the PSP == parents worst nightmare. I don't think we are still aware of what the DS/PSP can actaully do. Give it a little more time, and somebody will think of a killer app for those gaming devices. But in the mean time, gaming on the phone will stay small untill the market begins to take notice. And it hasn't noticed yet.