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?

[icebraining]

Have you RTFA? He talks nothing about fragmentation:

The HD version of Rage is 1.4GB installed, and all the world geometry is using 2-bit PowerVR texture compression. If we went to one of the other platforms that's not PowerVR-based, we'd be stuck with a 4-bit texture compression format, and that pushes the size over 2GB. And the Android Marketplace doesn't even let you download more than 20 or 30MB, and you have to end up setting up your own server and doing your own transfer for all of that. Dealing with the user interface of managing space... there's a lot of things that happen automagically for us on iOS that we'll have to deal with particularly on the Android space. And that's not a lot of work that's going to be huge heaps of fun to do. It's going to be dreary, tedious work that I would certainly push on somebody else personally, but I'm not sure that even as a company it's something that we want to be involved in.

Even in the old days of the feature phone world, we always had EA Mobile or JAMDAT to build the 300 or 400 SKUs that they had for all the worldwide feature phone splits that we had from our four base versions. And we may yet wind up partnering with somebody else to do that level of broad support, but that's a little less satisfying when we're doing something that's pushing the limit graphically, because you don't have a second-tier company port your stuff to other graphics architectures and expect it to remain cutting-edge.

Basically, he needs Steam for Android.