Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
It costs money, it costs time, it costs support post-launch. Unable? No. Unwilling? If the return on investment (both monetary and effort) isn't there, then yes.
Remember that before Quake Live, Id games' online support basically consisted of a master server that just gave you a list of servers, and an FTP server with patches that relied on popular mirror sites to prevent it from going down due to demand (which it sometimes still did when new patches were released). They didn't even host their own servers, much less their own online distribution platform for the assets of the entire game. And Quake Live is basically an 11 year old game at this point. The size of the assets, method of distribution, and demand for the game are all going to be different (smaller) from a brand new AAA title like Rage is intended to be.
If Apple does the hosting for you, but Android does not (for files over 30 MB), that's a huge difference.