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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
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.
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.
Nobody really buys a Blackberry for the express purpose of gaming, and it's not at all a gaming platform, but games are very popular on them. Same goes for other phones. Though gaming is never going to be the focus of the iPhone, games could be the thing that pushes some people over the edge to get one.
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.
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.
Seriously. I don't think people buy more than two or three of those Java
All your base are belong to Wii.
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"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.
What you're describing are approximations catering to an inappropriate control scheme. I'd like to see you play Megaman with your finger, or something more complex like Castlevania. I'd like to see you get past 50 lines in regular Tetris making those crossing motions you describe. Virtual buttons have no tactile feedback, imagination has nothing to do with it. They take up screen space, and what you have left is a graphically superior Gameboy Color. Gratz, you beat Nintendo c. 1998, albeit with even more cramped controls (iPhone's really thin to be playing Gameboy-style for very long). A bluetooth addon would either drain the iPhone battery faster, or require its own power source which would need to be charged also. That's not very enticing to me.
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.
They don't need to either.
Ah yes, of course, because they already dominate the worlds home computer market, how silly of me.
Oh wait...
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
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.
Define dominate. They're already skimming the lion's share of the premimum computer market (70% or so?). And the online music and video market. And the mp3 player market. And they're making a pretty good dent in the premium smartphone market after just one year and one phone.
If you ask me the smartest thing they can do is just keep on doing what they're doing, and let the other idiots fight it out in the $495 beige-box zero-margin marketplace.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
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.
Yup, and actually, I think the iPhone will make a pretty good handheld console once control pad addons such as this come out.
You just got troll'd!
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.
Seems a little pointless to buy something you can download for free.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
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.
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
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.
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.