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

[bfandreas]

You are developing for Android which has quite a bit of a user base.
All you need to do is submit your thing to Google Play and be done with it.
It also forces people to support game controllers for their Android games. Simulating twin sticks with a touch screen is pathetic when the system supports any USB game controller that would also work on a PC. Well, at least it does support it on ICS. Not sure about Honeycomb. It's not even going the extra mile but the extra inch.
Riptide GP THD does also support 3D monitors with this nVision thing from nvidia. Works great, too.
Now imagine what basically is an Android tablet without a touch screen, the need to be as slim as possible, quite a lot of manufacturers where to buy parts(chpsets, connectors and so on) and you will find that the Ouya is not only viable but also a neat idea.
Sonic got ported to Android, there are Amiga emulators that work great with a controller, there is MAME and DosBOX. I bought Master of Magic from GOG(I still have the floppies but no drive anymore) and play it on my Transformer Prime.
I think I recall distinctly that Apple doesn't want emulation in the AppStore.

Userbase: [x]
Parts manufacturers: [x]
Already available popular games: [x]
???
Profit.
I propably won't buy one for myself because I already got a similar system. But it did cost substantially more than the Ouya. IMHO they should reconsider Google Play. Sooner or later somebody will hack it into the system.

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

[gl4ss]

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.

may as it be, but the comment is kinda strange coming from the dude who made his fame and money on a system that had bare metal access and loads of piracy - the dos pc. apple's ios doesn't offer that kind of access(you go outside the api's and the app isn't supposed to make it to the store) or freedom.

maybe the comment about not doing anything new with it is in regards of ouya which is true: it doesn't really offer anything a generic 100 dollar android pc doesn't, in that regard ouya reminds me of some branded "gaming pc"'s that some brands advertised as the next coming of jesus back in the day while they offered nothing the generic pc didn't(usually they just came bundled with say sound card ready installed, but you could order pretty much any pc that way anyways).

there's two things devs should consider usually: is it possible to port and is it possible to get enough users. that's how pc killed amiga etc. despite being much bitchier platform to code for and despite having the rampant home-copy piracy that consoles lacked. it just had such a large userbase and it offered things that weren't possible on competing platforms.

and may as it be but for warez is easier to find for ios than randomly chosen android sw that doesn't happen to be in some pack.

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

[Narishma]

He wasn't involved in Quake 3. He was fired after they released Quake 1.

Strange comments ...

[Grieviant]

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.

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.

Re:Do NOT feed the TROLL!

[bfandreas]

Ummm, John Romero lost all credibility AGES ago.
The first person who said it was a piracy platform was a guy who sold his free to play game for 1$. It still got pirated because it was a pay-to-win game that honestly wasn't worth the admission fee. Romero is again making you his bitch. And Slashdot too as it would seem.

The Ouya is a valid platform. I have hooked up my tablet to my monitor/a friends TV a couple of times and played quite a few very good games on it. At the price point those games usually sell piracy is indeed a service problem.

Not sure if troll or stupid.

John Romero?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh that's cool, maybe next we can get Rico Suave's view on current music trends as well...

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

[macshit]

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.

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.

Piracy is not the problem - incumbency and bugs ar

[Qwavel]

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.

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: Oh, John Romero...

[hey!]

Alright, lets clear up this business about when ad hominem is a logical fallacy. Using ad hominem to impeach an argument is a fallacy. Using ad hominem to impeach evidence is perfectly valid.

If Romero makes an argument, drawing from generally accepted truths, that "Android is a piracy platform," you can't dismiss the argument because this is Romero talking. If, however, it is reported to you by a reliable that "Romero says that Android is a piracy platform," in the absence of any information on his argument (or if he is simply making an unsupported statement), you can take your opinion of his reliability on that subject matter into account when deciding how much credence to give that statement.

Imagine how much thinking you'd get done if you were obliged to hunt down and evaluate the arguments made by any nutcase with an ax to grind. Since nonsense can be generated instantly as needed, you'd spend all of your time trying to pick sense out of nonsense. Yes, when the argument is right there, or in special circumstances you do have an obligation to give even a nutcase's arguments a fair hearing. But in general if somebody has a track record of unreliable reasoning, you don't owe his arguments a hearing before dismissing them if the conclusion sounds unreasonable.

I once had a dear friend who believed anything. He stored his razor in a pyramid because "pyramid power" would keep it sharp. He didn't know anything about electronics, but following instructions in a book he built a UFO detector circuit which he asserted worked because "it goes off all the time." He believed in fairies, ghosts, bigfoot, and sentient clouds that lived in the stratosphere. I found his notions about cryptozoology particularly charming, because they *might* be true, and a tramp in the woods to hunt hoop snakes and Pukwudgies was harmless amusement. But I didn't feel the need to give his theories about "pyramid power" a fair hearing.

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.)