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iPhone's Game Potential As a Threat to Java Phone Games
Ian Lamont writes "In the runup to Apple's WWDC 2008, Chris Tompkins thinks that the iPhone's gaming potential 'might finally put the lackluster Java-based cell phone gaming market to death.' He cites the iPhone's use of Core Animation adapted for ARM processors, which he says allows for the advanced effects of OS X and now OpenGL-accelerated 3D games, as well as the importance of an on-demand store and Internet connection. Tompkins says that while certain genres lend themselves to the iPhone's touch controls, such as real-time strategy games (think StarCraft) the lack of physical controls will force developers to creatively approach the multitouch and accelerometer on the iPhone. His advice to Apple — make a compelling overture to independent game designers, and treat them like rock stars. Tompkins, incidentally, is one of several people who have recently pointed to Apple's mobile gaming potential."
game is so popular in OS X
Well not really, but I was wondering WHAT market? Will the Iphone really make a dent in the huge trading arena of java phone games?
battery drain!
The iPhone will only put the "lackluster Java-based cell phone gaming market to death" when most phone users out there are iPhone users.
Apple has captured an impressive portion of the smartphone market, but their overall market share among all cellphones is minuscule.
Do you guys seriously believe that the gaming market for the iPhone is going to just kick off? The iPhone was designed to play music, to surf the web, and to talk. Playing games was not and is not the focal point of owning an iPhone. You can't just release a device like an iPhone, wait a few months, and then call to arms the video game industry. The problem with the iPhone and gaming is that the iPhone isn't a gaming platform. People are not going to buy an iPhone with the express purpose of gaming.
The threat isn't to shitty cellphone games. The threat is to the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable. The iPhone has a touch screen like the DS and can play movies like the PSP, and WiFi like both of them, plus it has a tilt sensor and oh, yeah, multiple gigs of storage space. Once the iPhone costs the same as a PSP and game manufacturers are allowed to build for it (ie. after Monday), Nintendo and Sony are going to be entering a world of pain.
Last I checked the only company making iPhones is Apple. There are and will continue to be many Java-based phones and companies that will make games for them.
The mobile gaming industry was $2.6 million industry in 2005 and expected to be $11.2 by 2010. I suspect most of that number is java games (never seen a non-Java games, except those that came with the phone).
Maybe he's only talking about the US marked?
Je ne parle pas francais.
Java Apps are a piece of slow loading, miss-designed, bad looking crap. No one will ever miss them when they go away; which hopefully will happen very soon.
Java is definitely everywhere in the Silicon Valley job market. It might be because Sun is here & the kinds of jobs that need to be here are related to Sun's world.
There's someone writing a Java spec for every problem imaginable & no-one willing to program them. But outside Java valley, it's nowhere. People briefly switch to a cell phone game or a blu-ray game, say gee wiz, and that's it. Back to the native stuff that does what the product was intended for.
The iPhone/iTouch would only work good for games like bejeweled and starcraft (if it was ever ported), but what about sidescroller games, tetris, any other type of addicting game, heck even racing games. There are no tactile buttons to press, and virtual buttons are bust when it comes to gaming.
The graphics libraries avalible are nice, but I don't think it is going to kill the current cell phone game market. The current market will likely adapt before apple realizes what they have anyway.
This entire discussion about the iPhone's new bling features, in 10 years time will read a bit like the bling new features of a calculator watch. I remember as a kid how everyone sat around comparing who's digital watch had the most buttons, or whether every watch will some day tell you your altitude and temperature and all sorts of other useless rubbish.
I smell feature-creep.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
OK, so...flamebait? WTF? I'm not suggesting the iPhone won't be capable of good games or even that there wont be good games. But Java games, crappy as a lot of them may be, are an already established, cross-platform industry. There are lots of Java-based phones. There's only one iPhone. So the iPhone will not "finally put the lackluster Java-based cell phone gaming market to death".
According to TippyCanoe at MacTipsToo, a third party has integrated game buttons into one of those rubberized protective holster for the iphone. Speculation is these communicate via a blue tooth interface or maybe the camera. So if that's actually true then problem solved. The neat thing would be if that make different kinds of button interfaces for different kinds of games(flight simmulators, etc.).
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Even if the iPhone is enormously successful, there's no way it poses a threat to Java phone games.
1. The iPhone's market share is a tiny drop in the global bucket, even if all the Apple-loving tech media journalists would like to have you think otherwise.
2. iPhone game development restricts you to a MacOS development environment. This basically guarantees that even if the iPhone becomes hugely successful, its place in mobile game development will never capture more than a minority status among game developers.
3. Unless all of the other mobile industry players spontaneously decide to line up behind Apple, Java is not going to lose ground to C# anytime soon as the language of choice for game developers.
4. Java is a programming language and a set of industry standards for mobile hardware, not mobile phone hardware itself. Pointing to the cool new hardware features that the iPhone supports isn't an argument against java phone games, it just points towards Apple's decision not to play nice with the rest of the industry standard apps and developers out there. If anything, this decision will limit the scope iPhone-specific game development (who wants to waste their resources on such a small market segment when they can make games that will run on a much larger amount of phones out there), it doesn't pose any threat to the use of Java as a mobile game development standard. At the very least, it means that Java game developers will have to wait for Sun (or any other company) to provide a good set of translation tools that will let them develop for the iPhone's hardware in Java.
world of pain?? come on. what a joke. the nintendo DS has sold over 80 million units worldwide in 4 years. with iPhones costing upwards of 400 dollars its never going to have the same market penetration as the DS.
and while it may have a touchscreen, its gonna be a nightmare to use without a D-pad. any hardcore gamer can tell that a device without a D-pad will never be taken seriously. most game genres are simply too dependent on traditional buttons. and the few games which are better suited at touch-screen input (as the summary says, games like warcraft3, heros of might and magic, etc) are simply not playable on a miniscule screen.
expect games along the lines of Tiger woods golfing and marble madness on the iphone. ninja gaiden, castlevania, mario, sonic, call of duty, GTA3/4, etc....forget about it.
I smell feature-creep.
A long winded way perhaps, of saying that the iPhone game potential is "Lame"?
OK Mr. "futurist".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Apple will never drop the price of the iPhone to the point where it can beat out the competition to become the standard phone people use.
Same as every other product they've launched.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
bzzz wrong, my recent Samsung TV/LCD have build in linux and uses Java. Blu-Ray - you have to use it if the disc has it - no opt out. On the other hand does it matter, cpu power is inexpensive - development time matters, as well portability. Good luck with C/native assemblers.
iPhone will be another Apple's nitche product (iPod excluded), like Mac it wiil conquer exclusive 4% of the market.
While there are a lot of possible ideas with tilt and touch only, the lack of real tactile buttons is a major problem for a lot of games. cellphones, ds, psp, all gameboys till today, all consoles, pc's all have buttons, which get used in most games.
the iphone looks like a sweet psp, but it definitely doesn't feel that way.
"might finally put the lackluster Java-based cell phone gaming market to death" I thought "Lackluster" was being generous. When was the last time you've heard someone say "OMG! You've got to play that 'insert java game here' on my cellphone!" Handheld consoles like the DS or PSP should be the ones quaking in their boots.
This is the single stupidest prediction I've ever seen here. So in his opinion all people on Earth should throw away their phones just because (potentially) there will be better games on the Iphone?
Using this logic why do we still walk, the bicycles are better. And why do we still use bicycles, the cars are better! Or why there are PC games, since consoles are better for gaming, etc...
Why would the developers be needed to treated like rockstars? Surely, if they are any good - they will see the platform based on its merits, and decide to develop or not develop for it based on rational metrics?
If a developer needs to be given cocaine, or have the red M&Ms separated from the other colors by Apple, then I question the value of that developer's input. Someone like that can't be far from the drug-fuelled implosion of their career. When people with egos like that go down, they tend to cause collateral damage.
... and then they built the supercollider.
BMW will never drop the price of the 5 Series to the point where it can beat out the competition to become the standard car people use...
Nor do they need to.
Every time one of these stories surfaces some marketing "genius" proclaims that the Mac/iPod/iPhone will never be the "standard", and that Apple needs to drop prices in order to be "competitive".
Guess what?
They don't need to either.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Gabe Newell of Valve Software (Makers of the Half-Life series, Portal, Counter-Strike, etc.) has said in an interview that they have spoken to Apple several times about getting their games on the Mac platform. Apparently, each time they're approached by Apple, Valve tells Apple what they'd like Apple to do, and each time Apple doesn't do it. Apple wouldn't say no to having games developed for the Mac or iPhone, but I just can't see them trying to cater to game developers. They've never done it before, despite ample opportunity.
"virtual gamepad devised will take up screen space"
Even a total interface noob could spend five minutes noodling and come up with the idea of near-transparent hot-zones near the corners that indicate buttons but without hiding much screen real-estate. Define some hot corners, use a context menu, and use the accelerometers for navigation (front/back turn) and doing a Doom/Quake interface would be relatively simple.
One might also mention that plenty of phone-based games have been produced that didn't need a dedicated gamepad.
Further, gamepads exist primarily in their current incarnation for one reason only: they provide a reasonable amount of control in exchange for a few cheap plastic buttons. As the Wii has shown, we can do better.
Joysticks, keyboards, mice, controllers... both developers and gamers will adapt.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Java Mobile = open platform used by cell phones from almost every vendor iPhone mobile = proprietary platform for 1 phone on the market
Horns are really just a broken halo.
"PSP = $170. NDS = $130. iPhone = $399."
Rumor has it that the price will drop, but you're missing the point. People won't buy a $399 game console. But they may well buy a $399 device that's a phone, and a text messager, and an email and internet browser, and camera, and music player, and movie player, AND a game player.
Further, if you have the iPhone, just how likely is it that someone is going to buy yet another portable device in any of those categories?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
At least here in (southern) Europe, Nokia and Symbian SIS games are the most common. Not bought though - probably leeched off e.g. gsmforum.
Andy
I haven't played a good cell phone game in a hell of a long time, and anything that was fun was from Japan, where they consider the cell phone gaming market viable. Hopefully either the iPhone kills off the market or they get their shit together and start programming stuff that's fun.
ROFL. 2.6 million? That's it? The _whole_ market? That's not even the budget for _one_ game on any proper gaming platform.
Sorry, I didn't know those numbers, but if that's it, now I understand why they call it lackluster.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Now I just need to get a stinking iPhone.
The iPhone won't kill writing games in java...
Java will kill writing games in java...
its not a high performance uber gaming language...
unless you don't like 3D pixelated shinies and bouncies...
Its great for monkey-zombie OCD click fests like SOLITAIRE! U know like bejeweled...
As other posters have mentioned, the unique capabilities of the platform align potential iPhone games more towards the DS/PSP spectrum than the drek we see for Java-based phone games. (Although the reality may end up being more in the middle, given that developers don't always take advantage of the unique opportunities unique hardware may present - cf. third party Wii games)
I think, however, that the iPhone will continue to be marketed mainly as a phone, and for the immediate future, carrier lock in, price points, and the market locked up by either business phones or the giveaway phones from carriers will keep the mobile java game market breathing.
However, the lower price point of the iPod touch, the fact that it doesn't involve changing phone carriers, etc., and the likelyhood that at some point it may completely supplant the traditional iPod Video, makes me think it might be poised to become more of a gaming platform than it's cellular brother. I don't see Apple making big steps to roll it out as such, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it move into that space in the minds of consumers, at least.
The iPhone won't put these games to death, but the nextGen smart phones will (timeline? Anyone's guess). They'll die because they suck, not because the iPhone is indestructible.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Five million in the overall world wide market is nothing. It's great for the smart phone market (as Apple keep telling us), but the gaming market isn't aimed at smart phones. The money is in small, casual games that you can play on a five minute break.
What you're going to get is a repeat of the current computer market where Apple gets thrown the gaming scraps because no-one wants to pour development money into something that has single digit market share (no matter how capable the hardware/software).
For comparison, Galactic Civilizations II, a PC only game by a rather unknown developer, made 8 figures (as in more than 10 million dollars). That's one game, from one publisher, and not a major title at that. For another comparison, World of Warcraft has somewhere in the realm of 10 million active players paying a monthly fee between $10-20 depending on region. That would be 9 figures PER MONTH.
So yes, $2.6 million is rather lackluster. Not surprising, the games blow and playing games on your phone cuts in to your talk time, but that doesn't change what it is.
Apple is bound by the same laws of physics as all the rest of us and that means battery life. While it sounds like a great idea to use one device for everything you quickly come to realise that if you do that on your phone, you kill your talk time. You just can't have it both ways: You spend the battery on toying with it, it isn't there for a conversation, you talk on it, you don't have the battery for other stuff.
This isn't something that is problematic if you use your phone a little bit, like playing 10 minutes while waiting for a doctor's appointment, but it is if you try to use it to replace other devices. If you listen to MP3s on your phone all day, watch a video on the train ride to work, then play a game for an hour at lunch time, well you are going to find that if you need to take a long call, you are fucked, especially if you don't remember to recharge every day (which many don't). Even if the processor is super efficient, those pretty active matrix LCD screens still suck a bunch of juice.
So I don't think you'll find people giving up their DS's and iPods just because they get an iPhone. Until we find a way to significantly increase the energy density of batteries, it just isn't a good idea. Phones already have a limited enough talk time, cutting in to that in any significant manner isn't a winning idea.
I'm not a java fan. Never have been. That being said you need an advanced 3d rendering framework to program the next gen of mobile gaming. It's really not fair to compare the two. If the mobile game market wants to standardize around a java opengl wrapper that would work, but until then it's really not fair to compare.
Where I work, in a design agency of 45 people in Switzerland, 15 of those people already have iPhones, and they're not even officially sold here yet.
The iPhone will do to the mobile phone market what the iPod did to the mp3 player market, albeit in a smaller fashion, because the market is already so saturated.
The iPhone is definitely not for everyone, and there will still be a market for other phones, especially smaller ones with physical controls as many people still prefer those.
But, in the smartphone segment, I am pretty sure that the iPhone will cream Microsoft, Sony and Nokia.
The rest of the world is almost entirely GSM. CDMA might be technically better, but it's simply not an internationally widely used standard.
There's a reason Apple is this year opening dozens of Apple Stores outside of the USA: They know the US economy is tanking and they know that their products are just as popular outside the USA as inside.
Apple is fairly good at recognising what the market outside the US is like, and that market stands to outgrow the US market if current economic factors continue.
At the bottom of the
This is a good community for iPhone game development.. http://www.idevgames.com/forum
No platform that incorporates the need for the vendor (or someone equally expensive) to "bless" your application by signing it will ever, ever enjoy the wide-spread adoption that common PCs do.
Surprisingly little people know this, but to deploy an application in J2ME, Symbian or iPhone, that does anything outside the trivial ("hello, world"), the application needs to be digitally signed (think SSL certificates) by a company the phone firmware "trusts". If you're lucky, this is one of the big authorities like Thawte, if you're unlucky this means every single mobile provider that sells phones as a part of their contracts or service.
What this means in practice is a significant monetary barrier to entry, at least compared to the Windows and Linux platforms, because every company that wants to deploy mobile phone applications needs to buy expensive certificates every couple of years (because they expire). This is also the reason why the open-source and freeware smartphone applications are a) few and far between and b) mostly very simple and crappy since they can't use the advanced APIs.
The official reason for the signing requirement is to protect users from viruses, etc. - which is completely wrong since it's obviously a failure (as demonstrated by the appearance of anti-virus software for smartphones). The real reason is the greed of phone companies and manufacturers. In the very unlucky case, an application developer needs to have his application signed by every single operator on whose phones he wants to deploy the application.
References:
There's a large number of similar rants if you Google them.
-- Sig down
iPhone's advnatage is that you will soon be bale to deliver software for it. Delivering Java apps to phones (in the USA) is such a PITA it's not a practical solution. Even with relatively few iPhone's out there, the market for the apps is comparably quite big. There's no need to negotiate with the vendor, no working around the modified Java security of vendor-supplied handsets, no having to deal with various features being disabled, not variations in J2ME/MIDPs, etc. The iPhone probably will put a dent in the mobile Java market -- doubly so if it somehow becomes cheaper (and more popular).
You couldn't generate any hits on your original post so you replied to yourself and you're having an argument with yourself? Pretty weenie if you ask me.
Oh, and the iPhone will siphon off a lot of game developers who see the huge earning potential in a new market. Sorry, but the fact that the Java based game market is lackluster, even though "there are lots of Java based phones", seems to indicate that people aren't really enjoying playing games on those crappy phones. The iPhone won't kill anything off, but it will erode support for the already lackluster market.
I think you are missing the point.
Nobody is saying that Apple will wipe out java-based games with market saturation, instead they will wipe them out by "changing the game".
In other words, every other cell phone manufacturer is going to realize that "Hey, we need to up our hardware/OS and start supporting 3d accelerated games, etc!".
So java based phones become a thing of the past, because of the market pressure from Apple.
I think this goes all to Apple's "Just works" philosophy. If a user cant screw around with certian settings, then they wont be able to stuff it up. So sometimes being gripped by the balls into an OS is good, but its not something most experienced computer/device users want.
I do have confirmation that what I said was funny, because I received personal LOLs from Slashdot users. For those of you who didn't get the joke, I replied to a post which:
CmdrTaco on the original iPod:
"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
CmdrTaco (possibly suffering from low blood-caffeine levels) effectively demonstrated a curious lack of big picture thinking which is often exercised a certain type of "new gadget" critic, who, in a hurry to their point in a succinct and stylistic manner, totally miss the interesting aspects of the device, subject of critique. (And some of whom, in the case of the iPod, didn't make money by purchasing shares of AAPL, but did manage to go down in history as "missing the point.") Unfortunately for CmdrTaco, the amazing market success of the iPod family has meant that there were lots of opportunities over the years for people to tease him, by quoting him. Nearly every time Apple comes out with a new product, there are variations on a theme of this critique, in various discussions in this forum.
Most of the references to this event, and there have been many, end in "Less space than a Nomad. Lame." I elected to be a little more subtle, but clearly some people got the joke.
"Slower than a nimrod" is uproarious, if you know this back story, and see that I found a subtle, indirect, and possibly even unintentional reference to the original critique upon which to play, and then transformed the tag line from the original critique, by approximately the same vector.
Please allow me to break it down for you.
I did, however, forget to capitalize Nimrod.
Furthermore, the Slashdot user to whom I replied, "Catch23" clearly *does* get the point, which one could easily ascertain by reading their comment. Obviously it's clear I wasn't insulting them. The point, of course, was that Apple did something which some of us now see to be a technique they often use. They said, "hey, we're all using these music player gadgets. We all love the idea, but the gadgets suck. Why do they suck?" Then they made a list. Then they fixed the things on the list, and made a product.
Nowhere, on anybody's list of things that sucked about MP3 players at the time was "wireless" nor "less space than a Nomad". Nobody on the planet cared about either of those. Wireless was too slow and too power hungry to do what you wanted to do at the time, which was sync quickly and listen a long time. Nobody knew what a Nomad was. They still don't (I assume it was a reference to the
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
They ship with it.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Its the end of all iPhone Java games!
Wait...there are no iPhone java games, nor Java on the iPhone. Let me rephrase it...
All Java Game developers will stop using Java and write games using those better iPhone quartz and OpenGL ES APIs!!
Wait...those won't run on anything but the iPhone!?!?!?? Hmmm. Logic is failing...title of slashdot article not making any sense... ahhh, slashdot, now I understand. Yes, I concur the iphone will end the need for games for all other phones because those people will just feel stupid and lame playing java-based games and be too embarassed to even play games in the presence of iPhone owners.
Wait, what that you say? There actually ARE 3d graphics API's for J2ME? It can't be! All 3d graphics API are belong to iphone!
I was going to write an application for mobile phones using J2ME. I found the signing issues so costly that I gave up. Even though I am a long time Java developer, I gave up.
I ended up writing the app as a web app in PHP, instead.
This signing problem is a worldwide problem.
In Japan it is the same signing nightmare.