John Romero's Doomy View On Android and Ouya

An anonymous reader writes "Romero is willing to give Ouya the benefit of the doubt, but he sees it filling a niche for neither gamers nor developers. 'I think it's cool that they're making a platform, but it's not really the answer that's coming from Apple about the next generation of consoles. Developers really want to invoke the spirit of the Apple II, Android isn't the operating system with which to do it,' Romero said. 'There are two platforms: [iOS] makes money [and] is still very programmable, like the Apple II, and then the other is Android, which is a piracy platform, and you're not doing anything new with it.'"

Comments

FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

FUD. Ouya will keep a tab on piracy by storing the titles in the cloud, similar to iTunes and most likely selling subscriptions instead of individual titles.

Re:FUD

[tooyoung]

So, as an app developer, I could develop for iTunes, or an unproven solution that is just like iTunes, but without the user base?

Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to program the Apple II. All you had to do was turn it on. You didn't have to buy a second, unrelated, $1000 computer just to write programs for it, nor pay $100 per year to the company that makes it. You didn't have to submit to sudden, arbitrary and anticompetitive censorship of the programs you could RUN ON YOUR OWN COMPUTER.

Apple may make many cool things, but lets not bullshit -- their devices are about neither creativity nor freedom -- they are about consumption, censorship, and control.

Re:Bullshit

[foniksonik]

And those are the walls that keep the pirates out. No not pirates, they will still make a profit. It's the brigands who just want an easy buck. The walls keep out the brigands and the freeloaders.

It's no different than a midieval town. No walls and you are an easy mark. Walls and it takes much more effort.

Re:Bullshit

[AmazingRuss]

... consumption and control are what makes it possible for me to make a living as a developer. I'm not going to make games for a device that I can't make money from.

Free is great, but what you get for free (as far as games go) tends to be kind of.... well... un-polished, ugly, and kind of broken. People working for free just can't put the effort into a title that people who can devote all their working hours can.

I haven't hit any creativity problems in iOS, and freedom is pretty pointless when you can't afford groceries.

Re:Bullshit

[mwvdlee]

that's how pc killed amiga etc.

The PC didn't really kill the Amiga. Or the AtariST for that matter. Both pretty much committed suicide by failing to improve their hardware.

Re:Bullshit

[oakgrove]

Ease of piracy is a large part of what made Windows into the juggernaut it is today. Just like Bill Gates said, they may not be able to charge pirates today but someday down the road they will. Android may be easy to pirate with today but it won't always be that way. Jellybean is already shipping with the ability to encrypt market downloads with a device specific key. More and more Android chews through the market share of the other OSs and at some point just like with Windows a tipping point will hit where the market share will be so overwhelming and the difficulty of pirating will be 'just so' that you won't help but be able to make money on the platform. In the meantime, make your money on iOS but keep an eye on Android. Don't forget to sharpen up those Java skills.

Re:Bullshit

[gl4ss]

oh fuck - I just realized that this is romero we're talking about and not carmack!

he's a fucking idiot and can't apparently design for shit nor code for shit. the games on which he was designer we're pretty much built around what the engine could or not do anyhow(keens would have been shit without carmacks engine and so would have wolf3d been and so would doom). he's lost the ball if he had any over fucking 20 years ago.

it totally makes sense that romero would say that android lacks apple II spirit and that iOS would have it because it's the total opposite. it totally makes sense too that he would be out of the loop of what's current gen(and what was last gen) in android tv boxes too so he's the last person you should ask for views on the whole matter.

"John Romero, who 25 years ago practically invented the first-person shooter genre with Wolfenstein 3D" is just total bullshit too.

Re:Bullshit

[Glarimore]

I agree. Romero hasn't been involved in any worthwhile game project since Quake 3.

Re:Bullshit

[techsimian]

Total crap.

The Amiga was an excellent machine that had plenty of hardware improvements over its lifetime. Their big failure was not finding a niche other than low-end video editing and games. The Amiga ran circles around both Macs and PCs, they just sucked as a business.

The ST was litigated out of existence.

Other than those two points you are totally correct.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

> The Internet killed shareware.

Not true. It's still there, it's just shareware versions are now called "Free" or "Light", and full version - "Pro" or "Platinum". Otherwise it's all the same "Buy Platinum version to remove ads", "Free version limits single session time to 30 minutes", "Light version only supports one protocol" etc.

Do NOT feed the TROLL!

[Anonymous Coward]

This article is nothing but FUD / misdirection / bullshit from a jackass that only cares about his own agendas... Shame on Slashdot for posting this flamebait.

I feel a great disturbance in the force...

[93 Escort Wagon]

As millions of Slashdotters' heads kerploded attempting to reconcile their love for Romero with their love for Android and disdain for Apple...

Re:I feel a great disturbance in the force...

[phantomfive]

Um, I don't think there are many people who love John Romero. John Carmack, yes, but.....
The public is fickle, and as soon as you act like an ass in public, will turn its love away from you.

Uh, there's also a huge Apple-loving faction on Slashdot. Slashdot isn't a monolithic entity, people have different views.

Re:I feel a great disturbance in the force...

[AbRASiON]

John Romero is often given unnecessary shit due to a marketing campaign someone else conjured up and he just said "ok sure" too. He's pretty much a very very nice and enthusiastic guy. John also had a HUGE amount to do with the design of episode 1 of Doom, which gets him mucho credit.

I will say I agree with the posters here, regarding the closed platform with an arbitrary cost to developers and how Apple isn't all roses.
It's a bit of a shitty and surprising thing for John to say. Especially the piracy, I'm sure that was the case when Android was new and it was mostly nerds using it, however it's very mainstream now and I'm not convinced the evil piracy Android system is anything like that anymore for the average user. Poor showing John.

Oh, John Romero...

[fredprado]

So speaks John Romero. He should know what he is talking about, things like making money and such, right? Oh wait. He was the guy who managed to bankrupt his company and failed to deliver several games for which he had received money in advance, and the games he did delivery were failures.

He also bought offices with marble floors, opening ceilings and all kinds of ostentation whilst trying his very best to destroy his company.

The only thing he did right in his life was trusting John Carmack in the beginning.

Re: Oh, John Romero...

[fredprado]

It is not an argument at all. I am just appreciating the irony of someone who has no clue about how to manage a business giving lessons on the subject.

Re:Windows is a piracy platform too

[Anonymous Coward]

a 93% market share?

Re:Piracy is not the problem - incumbency and bugs

[PsychoSlashDot]

Piracy is not as big a problem as some devs are making it out to be.

I agree. The real "problem" is that (many) developers just don't get it that their fart app really isn't worth $.99 to most people. Clue: your weather widget... it's a fart app. Your uber-mega-clock? It's a fart app. Battery Gauge Max++ Professional Edition is... a fart app. If you really dig on Google Play, you're going to see thousands of "apps" almost all of which are just superfluous fluff. Even most of the games are roughly equivalent to the freeware of the Windows platform circa 1990.

Developers... get this: unless you're making either a top-tier game or a truly powerful app like Documents to Go or Repligo PDF Reader, you're making crap we don't need. Some of your fart apps we might kinda-sorta want, a little bit, maybe. And sometimes someone of us might bother with your token microtransactions because we're bored. But don't think counting on that income is a valid business plan. It's not. There are five other stock-ticker apps out there that are actually free instead of almost-but-not-quite-free. Sure, maybe yours comes with a blue icon and sure, maybe that's enough motivation for someone to pirate yours instead of using one of the free ones with green icons, but don't kid yourself... you didn't get pirated because Android blah blah platform for piracy blah blah. No. You got pirated because your product really, truly isn't worth $.99 (With the notable exceptions mentioned earlier.)

Re:Piracy is not the problem - incumbency and bugs

[multicoregeneral]

What's always amazed me about all of this is the idea (and I've heard some really bad app developers tell me this) that all you have to do is put your product in an app store, be it iTunes, Android, or anywhere, and just sit back and collect the money. On what planet do these people come from? It's a fair question, because here on earth, the paradigm for selling software hasn't really changed a lot since the 1990's. You have an app to sell? Awesome. Get online, get yourself listed everywhere, build a support ecosystem where you engage your users and make them feel like the product was worth it, be awesome, and then collect the money. You see it time and time again. Those that succeed do some variation of this. Those that don't... well, they're rightly upset that they're stuck with a bunch of eggs that never turned into chickens. That's what you get for counting them before they hatch.