John Carmack Not Enthused About Android Marketplace

An anonymous reader writes "During an in-depth and informative interview, Doom creator and id Software co-founder John Carmack opines on iOS game development, the economics of mobile development vs. console development, why mobile games lend themselves to more risk-taking and greater creativity, and finally, why he's not too keen on the Android Marketplace as a money-making machine. '...I'm honestly still a little scared of the support burden and the effort that it's going to take for our products, which are very graphics-intensive.'"

Comments

Re:Rage for Android?

[Anne Thwacks]

Ok So I like feeding trolls, but

On Android, you check ot the data and find that almost all phones are running 2.x and if you develop for 2.0 it will run fine on any 2.x phone. In any case, the phones that were sold with 1.6 can be upgraded to 2.2 for free by anyone who cares. Actually, 2.0 and 2.1 are almost dead now.

When the new phones come out they wont have twice the resolution and four times the processing power. We have seen the future, and it is now. We are over the knee in the curve. Past the point of inflections, into well charted waters.

The HTC Desire (old) has the same resolution as the Desire HD (new), which is 800x480. Did you learn nothing from the history of the PC? (If you were nothere when it happened you have no excuse, cos boring old farts like me have told it over and over anyway: Up until VGA (640x480) there was a new resolution every few months. Once we got VGA, then over a 10 year period, we migrated to 800x600, and even now we have 1024x768 on most of the PCs in Comet, Dixons or what ever they are called in your country. Sure the hardware can do better, but no one bothers to set it up.Why? cos 800x600 is good enough. Hardcore gamers are not the market for Android phones. The rest of the world will only pay for good enough.

And if you develop for the common denominator, no one bothers to upgrade cos it does them no good. see: fragmentation is just FUD. However, better battery life would be something smartphone users might pay for, and that means people will play^h^h^h^huse your same old app for longer before the battery dies. (And maybe even learn how to get the pearl out of the Oyster?). Higher resolution and more processing power are the mortal enemies of battery life.