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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."
Yeah well, when they came out with their first version of their iPod music player, it was expensive, bulky, and claimed only a small percentage of the market. Wait a few years and you'll have iPhone Mini/Nanos replacing your Nokia and Sony Ericssons. When the iPod was initially released, one could argue the Mp3 player market was already saturated with no clear winner. One could argue the cell phone market today is pretty similar.
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.
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 live in a market where phones often come "free" with contracts. And still, the iPhone came and conquered. The market for "phones" may be saturated, but have you seen mobile phones recently? Their user interfaces are designed by shizophrenic sadists. I know people who avoid entire companies because their UI is so horrible that they classify it as unusable. And these are people who want a phone for the basic functions, like calling someone and keeping an address book. Using the calculator is an advanced usage case for them.
The iPhone taps into that market in addition to the techies who want it for the geek factor, and the marketing dudes who want it for the cool factor, and the Mac-heads who want it for the integration. And the market for people who want a great phone that's easy to use is HUGE. If the rumours are true and Apple will allow subsidies, they could've trouble mass-producing iPhones fast enough.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The newer ipods have their firmware encrypted so you cant even put rockbox on them. Open platform? Yeah right. Too bad as well, I love rockbox and all the extras it allows. I don't know why apple cares that much.
The phone market might be full, but the phone gaming market sucks terribly. There is a lot of opportunity for someone to come in and do it right (unlike, say the Nokia N-Gage).
Look at it this way: the smartphone gaming market is pretty much empty.
As an iPhone owner, I'll be the first to tell you not to buy it for the keyboard. It functions pretty well most of the time, but I'll often find myself hitting return rather than space (it shouldn't be that big of a button) and the auto-correct is really hit or miss. I'll take it over having a physical keyboard and losing half of the screen, but I'd love to be able to carry around a little fold-up keyboard and my iPhone and ditch the laptop when I'd be focusing almost entirely on heavy email and web browsing. I've typed out a few-paragraphs-long email on the virtual keyboard, but it's not to the point where it would replace my laptop entirely for more frequent work.
You'll get more teens buying it than blackberry-lovers, though, especially come tomorrow (?) when apps start becoming available. Money be damned, teens and early-twenties are the ideal market when it comes to spending disposable income, and it's an ideal device for that market (I'm not saying it's overpriced for what it is - I don't regret spending $600 a couple days after it came out - but the majority of cell phones are either provided by businesses to employees (blackberries) or cheap, crappy, free-with-contract types). It will end up as this little bizarre do-everything device at that point, though you can be sure that Apple makes sure that it's core features aren't neglected. The blackberry is too email-centric and if that's your #1 priority, you'll want the "real" keyboard. I'd buy one in a heartbeat if it were to become available, and certainly wouldn't say no to a slide-out version like so many crap phones have today if it didn't compromise anything else on the device (that's probably the one thing that would get me to buy iPhone 2.0, seeing that I have enough trouble getting any signal out here, let alone 3G).
Having played a few games on it of varying quality, it's a pretty nice platform if developers adapt to the interface. Trism is a great example. The NES emulators not so much, since you're just forcing games made for physical controllers in to a touch/accelerometer device (they work well enough, but are awkward as hell). And teens + games = profit. Again, not so much on the blackberry market.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
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.
True. Any major game developer isn't going to mind spending a few grand on Macs. Heck, even smaller developers like PopCap can afford it (and are doing so).
Further, you get an added bonus. Develop a game for the iPhone and you're probably close to having a game that could be upgraded and sold to the entire Mac audience. Develop for Symbian, however, and... well... you have a game for Symbian.
Sorry about that.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
"This won't happen in sufficient numbers to hurt Nintendo, though."
Maybe so. Or maybe not. That's a matter of opinion, but either way it's certainly not going to HELP Nintendo.
BTW, did you read the article about how the inclusion of a GPS system in the iPhone has the world's largest dedicated GPS device manufacturer scared to death?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I suspect that you're forgetting a major incentive for a game company. As it stands, EVERY game downloaded to an iPhone from the AppStore will be paid for, unlike some platforms where you're lucky if one in ten users isn't ripping you off.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
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 has one of 2 CPUs that are build into the DS and merely a small fraction of the processing power of the PSP. So how exactly is it any competition to either of the two? Not to mention that there are hardly any game titles for the iPhone and there will be hardly any titles for it. Historically Apple does not suck up to anyone and I would be surprised if this is any different. So the future of the iPhone as a gaming device is actually nonexistent. Any why should there be one? After all Apple entered the phone market and NOT the gaming one. After years of repeating the same thing it should have gotten clear to most of you that Apple has no aspirations towards gaming and they really don't care if they can exponentially increase their market share by doing .... ( you fill in the blank ). The is a concept called manageable growth and most business people know that this is the holly grail. Plus would you really lust over that Ferrari if they dropped 150 horses and made it truly affordable? And yes the iPhone or any other Apple product is nothing like a Ferrari although they are doing their best to approach the price point.
I don't expect technology people to see the problem. In general they are happy having to learn the various hoops you need to to get the best out of a device. The remaining people just want something that does the job as easily as possible. The iPhone fits these users. It may not have all of the features that the other phones have, it does execute the features it has better than the competing phones.
As an example of poor implementation I'm currently using a Nokia E61 with the latest firmware on it. It has a nice web browser, built off Web-Kit. If I select a URL from the messaging app it launches a WAP browser instead of the web browser.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
Especially when You consider that MacOS, while quite popular amongst Java developers, is completly unused in JavaME development. Mainly because of the fact, that JavaME is not available for Mac... Having said that, it's not only changing Your skills, processes, tools whatever, but it means changing Your whole environment...
The iPhone is not primarily a phone. It's a mobile computer that happens to have a phone in it. You can even buy one that doesn't have a phone in if you hate telephones.
The iPhone/iTouch is a mobile computing platform. It's the new Newton. That's the (open) secret.
Other companies are attempting to come up with a phone that has a similar UI to the iPhone, and that is natural, since you will probably have trouble buying a phone that doesn't have multi touch in a few years.
Like Jobs said in another context: they are digging in the wrong place. The future isn't a phone, but a mobile computer that happens to be a phone. It isn't the UI they should be trying to copy, but the platform. Google seems to be the only company that realizes this (perhaps Microsoft does, but they can't seem to do anything about it - I say this as the depressed owner of a Winmobile phone. I'd rather attempt to use an interface that involved dodging live cobras).
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
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.
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.
And stand alone cameras are much better than crappy cellphone cameras. And stand alone MP3 players are better than MP3 phones Yet, cameras and MP3 players in cellphones move units.
The people who will become iPhone gamers are very unlikely to be the people who own PSPs or DSes. They are the mobile equivalent of the people who play Bejewelled and Slingo Quest on their PCs. Yes, there are dedicated gaming platforms that are better than your office PC for playing games, but the casual space is HUGE and those people don't want a Playstation.
iPhone users are into gadgets, are used to downloading things that they purchase and they have a toy with a beautiful screen. Some chunk of them will want to play games on it.
I have a lot of opinions about Cyborgs and Architects
In the US, it is possible to use the iPhone with an AT&T pre-paid SIM card and plan. I presume you've already performed the cost benefit calculation, as the break even minutes between pre-paid and post-paid plans is pretty low for a business user, especially with the rollover minutes allowance.