Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
I agree. Furthermore, the iPhone SDK works on OS X 10.5 only to my knowledge. It certainly doesn't run on any PC and probably doesn't run on OS X 10.4 since Apple is fond of dropping everything but the latest and greatest from the list of supported products. So if a company wants to develop a game for the iPhone they'll have to do it in OS X and that's not something any "real" game studios are doing and I hardly see a huge market for applications on a single device when the device in question hasn't been out for more than a year. What's more, how do we know that the current iPhone and the next generation of the iPhone, the so-called iPhone 2.0, will run the same code? It likely will, but the possibility is still there.
My favorite example of Apple breaking functionality on purpose is the 32-bit version of OpenGL in OS X 10.4. The day Leopard was released so was a 64-bit version of OpenGL, but it was for Leopard only. Thus I couldn't compile anything in 64-bit that used OpenGL because the OpenGL library was 32-bit only and I couldn't upgrade the library without upgrading to Leopard. Microsoft would draw so much more bad press if they did this with every Windows release.