""Entirely artificial"? Xbox Life was released a YEAR after Halo was, how were they supposed to support it?"
Kind of answered your own question there. There's an ethernet port on the box. I would call ordering developers not to use it for a year just so they can gouge subscription fees an 'artificial' restriction on what can be done with the hardware.
Of course having cameras allows the police to direct finite on-foot resources vastly more efficiently. Do you see?
Oh, and if 'the violent crime rate in the UK is growing fast' (source?), that's more likely to be down to police being needlessly diverted to endless 'anti-terror' shite-abouts that do not serve the public interest in any way.
FFS. Americans: Please accept that in other countries, we are able to distinguish between public safety issues and privacy concerns. The government is not using CCTV cameras to spy on you. Take the tinfoil helmet off.
I don't recall how long it took. Once I'd beaten the final AI opponent nothing happened. I left the game running overnight and eventually the win condition triggered itself. A fitting ending for a horribly botched game.
"if you can suddenly shave off $250,000 + off of your startup costs (by using an open-source engine as opposed to licensing the tech), or more (as opposed to developing the tech from the ground up, which could cost millions), why wouldn't developers want to go the open-source route?"
Please show me where you can obtain a commercial quality console or PC game engine and tools for free.
"the main issue at this point is publisher resistance. publishers are the 'old school' business-mindset like the RIAA and the MPAA - they refuse to acknowledge that open-source exists and that it might be useful to their businesses."
This is completely false. Publishers want a saleable product. They would be more than happy to invest in a project that used existing o.s. tech if it meant they didn't have to sink millions into an unproven team/design. Witness the widespread uptake of the Unreal, Id, Havok and Renderware (etc.) technologies.
Publishers are simply not being approached by developers using open source engines or tools because no suitable ones exist to make modern games.
I think that ultimately Open Source is viable for the games industry, but the development cost is very steep and likely to remain so for a while yet. If we consider how long Mozilla took to get going even with huge resources, and that the browser is a (comparitively) stationary target, we have to consider that Open Source games development may never close the gap. Although on the positive side, the useful advancement of graphics and physics tech for games could be argued to be slowing down.
So basically adding/polishing some new content and adding online play (probably the most glaring - and entirely artificial - omission from the original Halo) takes several years?
I think a lot of Xbox owners are in for a shock when they discover Halo 2 is not the second coming, but rather an incremental upgrade of a briefly fashionable game, painfully constricted by outdated hardware.
There seems to have been a mistake.
on
Sims 2 Goes Gold
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· Score: 1
I absolutely agree. Hard|OCP should stick to what they're good at and not embarrass themselves by entering into playground feuds.
The title of the topic is gloriously wrongheaded also- the Phantom (and the business model it represents) is in no way, shape or form intended to compete in the traditional console market.
However you've introduced a healthy dose of Americanocentric (?) historical revisionism.
"2 - Sega Master System fails" - True, it didn't dent the NES's popularity in the US, but it was by no means a failure. Lots of sales, lots of support.
"3 - Sega Genesis is a moderate success due to Sonic the Hedgehog (but has no competition for 2 years)" - What rot. The Mega Drive quickly lassoed upwards of 80% of the market and didn't drop below 50% until a significant amount of time after the release of the SNES. That success was not due solely to one game, nor lack of competition. This is where Sega most significantly influenced the course of the 'console wars' - the MD completely wiped Nintendo's incumbent NES monopoly, and indisputably brought forward the development and release of the SNES.
"6 - Sega Genesis fails" - I think you'll find the machine was still healthy up until the point Sega prematurely pulled the plug on all their existing systems to concentrate all resources on the Saturn. Even the Playstation took a little while to inherit all of the 16-bit market.
Hmm, so every machine that doesn't have at least a 90% stranglehold on the market 'fails'? My advice would be don't get into any arguments with Apple fans.
Sigh. Why continue to regurgitate hopelessly skewed logic from XBL press releases? Did you not read the rest of the posts?
If XBL makes things easier for developers (which it doesn't, in any conceivable way, unless we're assuming that the developers have never written a line of code before*), why aren't they climbing over each other to support it?
Not that 'ease of use' is the crux of the issue anyway- the sticking point is that developers have a choice of 'use Xbox Live' or 'don't include an online component at all'. The result of such a self-serving strategy is inevitable: a paucity of online games on the Xbox.
MS allow their hopelessly flawed, cynical and myopic view of online gaming as an enabler to sell 'premium content' to prevent them from stealing a march on the rival platform holders. Online play *could* have been the differentiating factor that would cause Sony to have to compete on MS's terms, but thanks to Live they completely squandered it.
*If coding (or more likely, buying in) a server browser / voice chat tools / etc. is outside of their 'core competency', what are they doing developing online games in the first place?
"The lack of MMO games is indeed a little bit embarrasing for Microsoft, but I doubt that has anything to do with Live per se. I think it has to do with the economics of MMO games being pretty dicey (look at all the PC MMOs that have been cancelled recently), and Xbox not having a large enough installed base for the business case to look good enough."
It has everything to do with Live, as I have explained. It is contractually (not technically) not possible for a third party developer to release an MMO game on the Xbox, thanks to Live.
I'd think a platform with an installed base of 10-15 million worldwide would be perfectly ample to support an MMO game, funnily enough.
"Unified sign-in and a friends list that you can share from title-to-title makes sense." (etc.)
True. Worth turning away potential online games developers for? Worth charging/$/40 a year for? No.
"Except that it's not like that at all. Xbox Live is used for matchmaking, and most of the work is in front-end UI, which you're probably rebuilding for the console anyway. In fact the Xbox SDK makes it quite easy to include this stuff (much easier than building from scratch). It means that game developers can focus on the game (where the network code is exactly the same), and not worry about launching and friends lists, and invitations, and voice, and so forth."
The problem is, the developer is given the choice of agreeing to use Live (along with the limitations, delays and expense- and, ok, to be fair, as well as non-essential perks like buddy lists and unified ID's, etc- that entails) or not including an online component in their game at all. I can understand why MS would want to maintain a stranglehold on this market, but success in the console market has to involve making third parties' lives easier. You didn't see Sony contractually barring developers from exploiting any of the functionality of the Playstation.
"I believe that Microsoft has done exactly the right thing in enforcing a high bar, and making sure that features like cross-game invitations and friends list work across all Live titles. The result is a much better experience for end-users."
Provided the end users expectations do not extend beyond unambitious shooting and driving games. I'm sure that for some gamers this is just fine and dandy, but it's painfully obvious that it's not exploiting the platform to the fullest.
Where are the MMO games? The online games in more experimental genres? Where are the primarily single player games where the developer has tossed in a multiplayer mode as a nice bonus, because they don't have to go through weeks of validation and extra licensing costs to submit the game to Live?
"I would hazard that it's because most people don't have an Internet connection in their living room because that's not where their PC is. So that means running cable from another room, or setting up wireless. Both of which require effort, money, and a moderate amount of expertise."
And is making Xbox owners fork out a yearly subscription to allow them to play a tiny subset of available games online adding to or detracting from this problem?
Thanks for those reasoned comments. Here's why they're wrong, to save you the trouble of asking any one of the vast majority of developers and publishers who have turned down Live.
"XBL makes it much easier for developers to make their games online enabled and to make money online with their games beyond the purchase (see DDR's for sale content.)"
Nonsense, as easily shown by readily observable facts. On every other platform (most notably the PC), there is no nanny-state platform vendor-controlled online gaming infrastructure. And yet there are thousands of perfectly successful and functional online games.
The developers of these games aren't idiots. They know how to build online games. MS's proposition to developers with Xbox Live effectively says:
"Hey! Why not add loads of time and expense to your project tearing down your own network code and sellotaping in ours, and in return, we (Microsoft) will get extra revenue from XBL subscribers! Wait, where are you going?"
"If it is such a failure, why have developers for PS2, with a much larger market considering the consoles sold and the potential to use broadband, only made 80 online games for the PS2 whearas the Xbox has just as many?"
Maybe it's because the PS2 requires extra peripherals to play online? Maybe it's because Sony aren't offering massive marketing kickbacks to publishers putting online games on their platform (see Activision, Ubisoft)? Or maybe- gasp- it's because they realise that there is no money in online console gaming at this time, and no amount of money sunk into an artificial, commercially unsustainable closed system does anything to change that. And how does this make XBL any less of a failure? The Xbox, a system pitched from day one as an online-oriented platform, has "just as many" online games as a system that has never made online gaming a priority. Wow.
"And only one in ten Xboxes have live? Any stats on PS2?"
See above. Every Xbox is technically capable of connecting to the internet out of the box. XBL prevents this. The real question is why aren't 90% of Xboxes being used for online play?
"And are you sure it's 1 in 10 for markets that live is available? I don't think they sold more than 10 million xboxes in the States, so it's probably a ratio higher than that."
There are less than 1m. Live subscribers worldwide, and ~15m. Xboxes sold worldwide. Live is available in virtually all the territories the Xbox has officially been launched in. (Even Japan.) So if anything I was being generous. (Or my figures are heinously wrong.)
It is a good idea, but it naively assumes that Xbox Live is a commercially- or consumer-aware venture.
Xbox Live was intended to be Microsoft's Big Thing that differentiated the Xbox from the PS2. It has never made money. Developers hate its draconian restrictions (no cross-platform games, no dedicated servers, no independently hosted MMO games, no patching or added content without MS's approval, players have to buy a subscription even if the game is totally non-reliant on MS's GameSpy-style services, no provision for keyboards and mice - fuck you hearing and speech impaired people! - etc. etc.).
(Yes I know about LSP. Too little, too late.)
Gamers have stayed away in droves (less than one in ten Xbox owners have signed up), with the exception of a few 100,000-strong chunk of the can't-afford-a-PC-yet American male teen demographic. Less than a million users world-wide after two years of incessant promotion? That's quite simply pathetic.
The software available is soul-destroyingly generic and anaemic, relying almost exclusively on the novelty aspect and crippled by the twin scourges of ridiculously low player counts and an educationally subnormal userbase.
The business model of Live is driven by paranoic conservatism. No other games publisher or platform vendor uses a walled garden approach of this kind because it's demonstrably unfit to support modern games and it doesn't serve the interests of consumers, save the most unadventurous of casual gamers (erm, provided they only want to play FPSs and racing games).
The mortal fear that people might play online games on the Xbox without paying a tax to MS obstructs developers at every turn. Look at the abortion that was the Xbox port of PSO - MS forced Sega to allow them to run the servers. An utterly farcical, Alice in Wonderland situation. The platform as a whole was categorically denied from having any online titles for the entire first year of its existence. Lunacy.
MS foisting Live on Xbox developers is the single largest factor preventing developers from tapping the platform's potential as an online gaming client.
(One particularly hilarious part of the interview is the concept of bringing Xbox Live to the PC. They really, really don't get it. Guys, remember when the first incarnation of MSN was smashed out of existence by the WWW? Do you see?)
"This is a big deal because the station is the broadcaster of pop music for our sceptered isle; it legitimises downloading and seems to show that the industry (or at least the BPI, our equivalent of the RIAA) is starting to accept it, rather than ignoring it and hoping it might go away."
Um, presumably this initiative is backed to the hilt by the BPI. It's a chart of *legal* (as in, the recording industry gets a cut) downloads. It's another of their completely ineffectual attempts to promote the over-priced and under-featured UK online music stores.
Funny how pieces like this never seem to consider the fact that most women don't buy and play games because they don't want to.
I don't care what gender the creators of any piece of media are. What relevance does that have to anything? Are these strapping male developers solely engaged in making games that drive women away screaming? Of course not.
Look at Nintendo, they'd be hard pressed to make their games any more inclusive. Perhaps more women buy their games than the industry average. I don't know.
But what about those (increasingly few, almost exclusively Western-developed and aimed at the teen market) games that focus primarily on violence? Well, why is it assumed that women are as superficial as to judge games based on their content? Is everyone who plays Splinter Cell a right-wing conspiracy wacko? Of course not. Setting is just wallpaper that gives the gameplay a recognisable grounding and context.
Are we ever going to see a 50/50 gender split of gamers? I doubt it. Do we need to? Not really. The objective is to provide everybody *who wants to play games* with something they want, not everybody period.
Do you mean it's not going to sell 100 million units like the GBA? No individual phone model does. I hardly think Nokia are kicking themselves for failing to do things they've never intended to.
First off, Americans: YES, your mobile phone situation is five years behind the rest of the world, YES, we've heard your off-topic and pointless Luddism whenever phones are mentioned hundreds of times before. Get over it.
The article just about qualifies as news, I guess, as hardware acceleration is starting to emerge which will presumably increase the move towards 3D games development on mobile handsets.
The assessment that current 2D games for phones are rudimentary is a bit far from the mark. Bear in mind the vast majority of GBA games are 2D, in spite of the machine's fairly competent (software) 3D capabilities.
The idea of mobile (or any platform's) games 'rivalling' the experience of a wholly different platform is a meaningless one. The key issue with mobile games is for the gameplay and I/O to be suitable to the device, rather than whether the processing horsepower allows for a trillion dynamically lit surfaces. Some genres (notably racing games) are at home anywhere, others are less suited to certain devices.
Slashdot Mirror
"These aren't a bunch of hardcore gamers in a garage with a great vision."
As opposed to Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo...
""Entirely artificial"? Xbox Life was released a YEAR after Halo was, how were they supposed to support it?"
Kind of answered your own question there. There's an ethernet port on the box. I would call ordering developers not to use it for a year just so they can gouge subscription fees an 'artificial' restriction on what can be done with the hardware.
Of course having cameras allows the police to direct finite on-foot resources vastly more efficiently. Do you see?
Oh, and if 'the violent crime rate in the UK is growing fast' (source?), that's more likely to be down to police being needlessly diverted to endless 'anti-terror' shite-abouts that do not serve the public interest in any way.
"I think it is a hyped up PC with gfx card and a subscription to a games download server"
Well, duh. This is the kind of incisive analysis I've come to expect from people who quote Penny Arcade.
FFS. Americans: Please accept that in other countries, we are able to distinguish between public safety issues and privacy concerns. The government is not using CCTV cameras to spy on you. Take the tinfoil helmet off.
"The final level of B&W took me 40 hours alone"
I don't recall how long it took. Once I'd beaten the final AI opponent nothing happened. I left the game running overnight and eventually the win condition triggered itself. A fitting ending for a horribly botched game.
So by 'every interesting game' you mean military sims?
"if you can suddenly shave off $250,000 + off of your startup costs (by using an open-source engine as opposed to licensing the tech), or more (as opposed to developing the tech from the ground up, which could cost millions), why wouldn't developers want to go the open-source route?"
Please show me where you can obtain a commercial quality console or PC game engine and tools for free.
"the main issue at this point is publisher resistance. publishers are the 'old school' business-mindset like the RIAA and the MPAA - they refuse to acknowledge that open-source exists and that it might be useful to their businesses."
This is completely false. Publishers want a saleable product. They would be more than happy to invest in a project that used existing o.s. tech if it meant they didn't have to sink millions into an unproven team/design. Witness the widespread uptake of the Unreal, Id, Havok and Renderware (etc.) technologies.
Publishers are simply not being approached by developers using open source engines or tools because no suitable ones exist to make modern games.
I think that ultimately Open Source is viable for the games industry, but the development cost is very steep and likely to remain so for a while yet. If we consider how long Mozilla took to get going even with huge resources, and that the browser is a (comparitively) stationary target, we have to consider that Open Source games development may never close the gap. Although on the positive side, the useful advancement of graphics and physics tech for games could be argued to be slowing down.
So basically adding/polishing some new content and adding online play (probably the most glaring - and entirely artificial - omission from the original Halo) takes several years?
I think a lot of Xbox owners are in for a shock when they discover Halo 2 is not the second coming, but rather an incremental upgrade of a briefly fashionable game, painfully constricted by outdated hardware.
This story has been filed under 'games'.
I absolutely agree. Hard|OCP should stick to what they're good at and not embarrass themselves by entering into playground feuds.
The title of the topic is gloriously wrongheaded also- the Phantom (and the business model it represents) is in no way, shape or form intended to compete in the traditional console market.
"2 - Sega Master System fails" - True, it didn't dent the NES's popularity in the US, but it was by no means a failure. Lots of sales, lots of support.
"3 - Sega Genesis is a moderate success due to Sonic the Hedgehog (but has no competition for 2 years)" - What rot. The Mega Drive quickly lassoed upwards of 80% of the market and didn't drop below 50% until a significant amount of time after the release of the SNES. That success was not due solely to one game, nor lack of competition. This is where Sega most significantly influenced the course of the 'console wars' - the MD completely wiped Nintendo's incumbent NES monopoly, and indisputably brought forward the development and release of the SNES.
"6 - Sega Genesis fails" - I think you'll find the machine was still healthy up until the point Sega prematurely pulled the plug on all their existing systems to concentrate all resources on the Saturn. Even the Playstation took a little while to inherit all of the 16-bit market.
Hmm, so every machine that doesn't have at least a 90% stranglehold on the market 'fails'? My advice would be don't get into any arguments with Apple fans.
I'm guessing you don't use public transport very much.
My paychecks seem to disagree.
Two years (approx.) and tens of millions of dollars of marketing to reach 1m subscribers worldwide?
That's an interesting definition of 'mainstream'.
Sigh. Why continue to regurgitate hopelessly skewed logic from XBL press releases? Did you not read the rest of the posts?
If XBL makes things easier for developers (which it doesn't, in any conceivable way, unless we're assuming that the developers have never written a line of code before*), why aren't they climbing over each other to support it?
Not that 'ease of use' is the crux of the issue anyway- the sticking point is that developers have a choice of 'use Xbox Live' or 'don't include an online component at all'. The result of such a self-serving strategy is inevitable: a paucity of online games on the Xbox.
MS allow their hopelessly flawed, cynical and myopic view of online gaming as an enabler to sell 'premium content' to prevent them from stealing a march on the rival platform holders. Online play *could* have been the differentiating factor that would cause Sony to have to compete on MS's terms, but thanks to Live they completely squandered it.
*If coding (or more likely, buying in) a server browser / voice chat tools / etc. is outside of their 'core competency', what are they doing developing online games in the first place?
"The lack of MMO games is indeed a little bit embarrasing for Microsoft, but I doubt that has anything to do with Live per se. I think it has to do with the economics of MMO games being pretty dicey (look at all the PC MMOs that have been cancelled recently), and Xbox not having a large enough installed base for the business case to look good enough."
It has everything to do with Live, as I have explained. It is contractually (not technically) not possible for a third party developer to release an MMO game on the Xbox, thanks to Live.
I'd think a platform with an installed base of 10-15 million worldwide would be perfectly ample to support an MMO game, funnily enough.
"Unified sign-in and a friends list that you can share from title-to-title makes sense." (etc.)
/$/40 a year for? No.
True. Worth turning away potential online games developers for? Worth charging
"Except that it's not like that at all. Xbox Live is used for matchmaking, and most of the work is in front-end UI, which you're probably rebuilding for the console anyway. In fact the Xbox SDK makes it quite easy to include this stuff (much easier than building from scratch). It means that game developers can focus on the game (where the network code is exactly the same), and not worry about launching and friends lists, and invitations, and voice, and so forth."
The problem is, the developer is given the choice of agreeing to use Live (along with the limitations, delays and expense- and, ok, to be fair, as well as non-essential perks like buddy lists and unified ID's, etc- that entails) or not including an online component in their game at all. I can understand why MS would want to maintain a stranglehold on this market, but success in the console market has to involve making third parties' lives easier. You didn't see Sony contractually barring developers from exploiting any of the functionality of the Playstation.
"I believe that Microsoft has done exactly the right thing in enforcing a high bar, and making sure that features like cross-game invitations and friends list work across all Live titles. The result is a much better experience for end-users."
Provided the end users expectations do not extend beyond unambitious shooting and driving games. I'm sure that for some gamers this is just fine and dandy, but it's painfully obvious that it's not exploiting the platform to the fullest.
Where are the MMO games? The online games in more experimental genres? Where are the primarily single player games where the developer has tossed in a multiplayer mode as a nice bonus, because they don't have to go through weeks of validation and extra licensing costs to submit the game to Live?
"I would hazard that it's because most people don't have an Internet connection in their living room because that's not where their PC is. So that means running cable from another room, or setting up wireless. Both of which require effort, money, and a moderate amount of expertise."
And is making Xbox owners fork out a yearly subscription to allow them to play a tiny subset of available games online adding to or detracting from this problem?
Thanks for those reasoned comments. Here's why they're wrong, to save you the trouble of asking any one of the vast majority of developers and publishers who have turned down Live.
"XBL makes it much easier for developers to make their games online enabled and to make money online with their games beyond the purchase (see DDR's for sale content.)"
Nonsense, as easily shown by readily observable facts. On every other platform (most notably the PC), there is no nanny-state platform vendor-controlled online gaming infrastructure. And yet there are thousands of perfectly successful and functional online games.
The developers of these games aren't idiots. They know how to build online games. MS's proposition to developers with Xbox Live effectively says:
"Hey! Why not add loads of time and expense to your project tearing down your own network code and sellotaping in ours, and in return, we (Microsoft) will get extra revenue from XBL subscribers! Wait, where are you going?"
"If it is such a failure, why have developers for PS2, with a much larger market considering the consoles sold and the potential to use broadband, only made 80 online games for the PS2 whearas the Xbox has just as many?"
Maybe it's because the PS2 requires extra peripherals to play online? Maybe it's because Sony aren't offering massive marketing kickbacks to publishers putting online games on their platform (see Activision, Ubisoft)? Or maybe- gasp- it's because they realise that there is no money in online console gaming at this time, and no amount of money sunk into an artificial, commercially unsustainable closed system does anything to change that. And how does this make XBL any less of a failure? The Xbox, a system pitched from day one as an online-oriented platform, has "just as many" online games as a system that has never made online gaming a priority. Wow.
"And only one in ten Xboxes have live? Any stats on PS2?"
See above. Every Xbox is technically capable of connecting to the internet out of the box. XBL prevents this. The real question is why aren't 90% of Xboxes being used for online play?
"And are you sure it's 1 in 10 for markets that live is available? I don't think they sold more than 10 million xboxes in the States, so it's probably a ratio higher than that."
There are less than 1m. Live subscribers worldwide, and ~15m. Xboxes sold worldwide. Live is available in virtually all the territories the Xbox has officially been launched in. (Even Japan.) So if anything I was being generous. (Or my figures are heinously wrong.)
It is a good idea, but it naively assumes that Xbox Live is a commercially- or consumer-aware venture.
Xbox Live was intended to be Microsoft's Big Thing that differentiated the Xbox from the PS2. It has never made money. Developers hate its draconian restrictions (no cross-platform games, no dedicated servers, no independently hosted MMO games, no patching or added content without MS's approval, players have to buy a subscription even if the game is totally non-reliant on MS's GameSpy-style services, no provision for keyboards and mice - fuck you hearing and speech impaired people! - etc. etc.).
(Yes I know about LSP. Too little, too late.)
Gamers have stayed away in droves (less than one in ten Xbox owners have signed up), with the exception of a few 100,000-strong chunk of the can't-afford-a-PC-yet American male teen demographic. Less than a million users world-wide after two years of incessant promotion? That's quite simply pathetic.
The software available is soul-destroyingly generic and anaemic, relying almost exclusively on the novelty aspect and crippled by the twin scourges of ridiculously low player counts and an educationally subnormal userbase.
The business model of Live is driven by paranoic conservatism. No other games publisher or platform vendor uses a walled garden approach of this kind because it's demonstrably unfit to support modern games and it doesn't serve the interests of consumers, save the most unadventurous of casual gamers (erm, provided they only want to play FPSs and racing games).
The mortal fear that people might play online games on the Xbox without paying a tax to MS obstructs developers at every turn. Look at the abortion that was the Xbox port of PSO - MS forced Sega to allow them to run the servers. An utterly farcical, Alice in Wonderland situation. The platform as a whole was categorically denied from having any online titles for the entire first year of its existence. Lunacy.
MS foisting Live on Xbox developers is the single largest factor preventing developers from tapping the platform's potential as an online gaming client.
(One particularly hilarious part of the interview is the concept of bringing Xbox Live to the PC. They really, really don't get it. Guys, remember when the first incarnation of MSN was smashed out of existence by the WWW? Do you see?)
"This is a big deal because the station is the broadcaster of pop music for our sceptered isle; it legitimises downloading and seems to show that the industry (or at least the BPI, our equivalent of the RIAA) is starting to accept it, rather than ignoring it and hoping it might go away."
Um, presumably this initiative is backed to the hilt by the BPI. It's a chart of *legal* (as in, the recording industry gets a cut) downloads. It's another of their completely ineffectual attempts to promote the over-priced and under-featured UK online music stores.
Funny how pieces like this never seem to consider the fact that most women don't buy and play games because they don't want to.
I don't care what gender the creators of any piece of media are. What relevance does that have to anything? Are these strapping male developers solely engaged in making games that drive women away screaming? Of course not.
Look at Nintendo, they'd be hard pressed to make their games any more inclusive. Perhaps more women buy their games than the industry average. I don't know.
But what about those (increasingly few, almost exclusively Western-developed and aimed at the teen market) games that focus primarily on violence? Well, why is it assumed that women are as superficial as to judge games based on their content? Is everyone who plays Splinter Cell a right-wing conspiracy wacko? Of course not. Setting is just wallpaper that gives the gameplay a recognisable grounding and context.
Are we ever going to see a 50/50 gender split of gamers? I doubt it. Do we need to? Not really. The objective is to provide everybody *who wants to play games* with something they want, not everybody period.
Do you mean it's not going to sell 100 million units like the GBA? No individual phone model does. I hardly think Nokia are kicking themselves for failing to do things they've never intended to.
First off, Americans: YES, your mobile phone situation is five years behind the rest of the world, YES, we've heard your off-topic and pointless Luddism whenever phones are mentioned hundreds of times before. Get over it.
The article just about qualifies as news, I guess, as hardware acceleration is starting to emerge which will presumably increase the move towards 3D games development on mobile handsets.
The assessment that current 2D games for phones are rudimentary is a bit far from the mark. Bear in mind the vast majority of GBA games are 2D, in spite of the machine's fairly competent (software) 3D capabilities.
The idea of mobile (or any platform's) games 'rivalling' the experience of a wholly different platform is a meaningless one. The key issue with mobile games is for the gameplay and I/O to be suitable to the device, rather than whether the processing horsepower allows for a trillion dynamically lit surfaces. Some genres (notably racing games) are at home anywhere, others are less suited to certain devices.
As predicted, it's another hamfisted Area 51-style digitised shooter. Time to retire, Mr. Jarvis.