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Game Devs Weigh In On Windows Phone 7
The mobile games industry has exploded over the past few years, driven largely by titles built for iOS and Android. The Guardian's games blog decided to investigate the pros and cons of Windows Phone 7 as a game development platform while it struggles to catch up to its predecessors.
"... the easy portability of code between WP7 and Xbox, plus the wealth of online tutorials, libraries and community support, is a massive advantage, especially for smaller and less experienced teams. ... As with Xbox Live Arcade, the console's downloadable games service, Windows Phone 7 offers a curated experience, which means Microsoft controls the quality of games appearing on the device. ... [Steven Batchelor-Manning of Nerf Games says,] 'The App Hub offers a good peer review system, where other developers are asked to check over your game. This helps filter out both low quality and bug-ridden titles. We are always given a particular quality to aim for. Once it's got past this stage there is also a chance that Microsoft will veto against your game going on the platform. Ultimately, this prevents the market being swamped, but above this, there seems to be a layer of games by big publishers (EA, etc) that just step past the smaller developers in the queue. This is the biggest drawback of the system.'"
As a WP7 app/game dev, I think the platform is stellar. For apps, it's trivial to make things smooth and impressive that integrate well with the look and feel of the rest of the phone. And that look and feel is miles ahead of what I've seen on Android and even a lot of iPhone. It's also trivial to go crazy with it and make something really unique that doesn't integrate at all, though that would probably be harder to get through the app verifiers.
Games are different. You're forced to write them with .NET and the XNA framework. For most of the casual games you play on phones this isn't really an issue, and writing with .NET can actually reduce dev time. But if you plan on writing anything really impressive that pushes the envelope like we've seen happening on iPhone and Android, you're probably going to be out of luck. The inefficiencies of .NET really start to add up, and some common things like memory mapping just aren't possible with it. I predict this will change in the future -- they just won't remain competitive without loosening up and allowing native code.
The gaming platform itself is pretty great. It's very easy to port games between PC/360/WP7 -- if you make it on one platform, you might as well make it for all of them and increase your sales. Your games can integrate with Xbox Live, so you've got all your friends and achievements right there which can be a huge factor in drawing in users.
Win7 for both mobiles and PCs is awesome, haven't you tried it yet? Linux and Android aren't bad for free but more discerning professionals will always choose Windows. Nothing wrong with paying a small fee for a highly-polished and rock solid platform. They have free 180-day trials at Microsoft, you should give it a try, you'll never look back.