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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.'"
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.
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.
But perhaps not that surprising considering Romero has moved to 'social' game development. Considering the dreck that falls under that category, such as Zynga's games, you might ask whether it really is all about the money now? That is, at least until he decides to do something else entirely different next year - his Wikipedia bio suggests he changes gaming studios and wives about as often as he changes underwear.
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.
Oh that's cool, maybe next we can get Rico Suave's view on current music trends as well...
No, no, it's Carmack that slashdot loves, 'cause he was the smart one.
Romero is the other guy, the one who was trying to look like Fabio.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Piracy is not as big a problem as some devs are making it out to be. The vast majority of Android users wouldn't have the slightest idea of how to pirate an app. The main group involved in piracy is young, techie gamers, but even then it is not a huge portion of users, and I believe that these users buy some games too.
I think the piracy problem is over-blown by game developers who are dissapointed with their Android sales, often due to (a) their game just isn't that good, or (b) Android users are more cost conscious then iOS users and generally spend less online, or (c) they are coming to Android late and the apps that got their earlier have the advantage of incumbency (which I find to be a huge advantage, though less so with games).
Moving away from games (where the Android test suite does better) to general apps the big problem is bugs. Android has tons of bugs (and a very lacking test suite). Since phones don't get update regularly, developers must work around old bugs indefinitely. Look at the average Android app and you will see various users complaining that the app simply doesn't work on their platform. That's the bugs.
Check out the Android bug list
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list
and you will see an astonishing # of bugs, and lots of comments from frustrated developers who are shocked that important bugs can take years to even be acknowledged by Google, let alone fixed (sorry for the bad grammer).
The most recent release (4.1.1) still has lots of bugs, but it appears to be much more solid then previous releases (like 4.0 and 2.3.0 which were shameful, in my opinion), so I hope this is an indication that Google is moving to get the bug infestation under control.
Finally, let me add that this problem has nothing to do with openness, open-source, or fragmentation. If Google would just start focussing on killings bugs, and extend the Android Compatibility Test Suite (the official test suite) so that manufacturers will stop introducing so many new bugs, then fragmentation would become diversity, developers would become more productive, and users would have a better experience.
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.
a 93% market share?
The meter shows me the mods' absolute indifference.
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.
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.)
"Oh no... he found the
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.
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Isn't it amusing, though, that the company John Romero started after leaving id Software actually produced more good games than id has produced since Romero was forced out? I realize that Romero didn't work directly on the "good" Ion Storm games, but it's still interesting. Ion Storm put out Deus Ex, Anachronox, and Thief: Deadly Shadows. These are three well regarded games. The quality of id Software's post Romero releases is debatable at best. Quake II was basically a map pack for Quake with insipid level and monster design. Quake III was a stripped down multiplayer only game that never appealed to wide audience of gamers like Doom and Quake (hint: people actually like good single player campaigns and expect them in addition to multiplayer components). Nobody bought Quake III's expansion pack, and the servers were empty from day one. Doom 3 failed to capture the magic of the original games. Rage was a commercial and critical disaster. John Carmack might be a brilliant software engineer, but Rage was a mess even on a technical level. The game's texture pop-in was horrible; it's the first game where you can look at a technical direction Carmack went and confidently state that he made a bad decision. It's staggering that they took seven years to develop such a mediocre, technically flawed game. The upcoming Doom 3: BFG Edition will be a poor seller; who wants to pay almost full price for an eight year old game? Unless their next game is a huge hit, id Software is in major trouble.