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For the past few months I have read nothing but story after story about how the iPhone is the new frontier, creating an "app" takes a few hours/days, and that the money just keeps coming to indie developers from the very ether itself.
I’m skeptical, and would like to know if I am alone in all this. My reason for skepticism is the fact that Apple, have (in my opinion) been the uber-buzz merchants (since day 01), who really know how to lay on the hype.
The most recent report excerpts are coming from "iPhone 3.0", reported here: http://kotaku.com/5180413/gdc-panel-why-the-iphone-just-changed-everything
with some notable excerpts.
The iPhone is changing the way we game, whether we like it or not.
"This is the new everything," said Young. "And the iPhone is the center of the new everything. And it’s just the beginning."
[/quote:889557f6d8]Does anyone here really think the iPhone is the be-all and end-all? That it is in fact heralding a new age of gaming? Or is this just the same rhetoric from Apple.
I mean, MP3 players were around for yonks, Apple release their, but call it an iPod, throw in some funky ads and the world forgets about all the rest.
Is this their strategy for mobile gaming? And will it work? I mean the gameboy/DS and PSP are way too important for anyone to overlook or forget, right?
Or was/is the same being said about all the MP3 players out there in the wild.
I don’t know about you guys, but I really (really) enjoy "buttons." Touch screen gaming just doesn’t do it for me. I don’t like the screen becoming occluded by my fingers, and I like the tactile nature of button-bashing.
But maybe I’m a dinosaur.
-Brendan
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I hope they mean its changing everything because its quite an open system, it doesn’t take a lot of money to get a game onto it.
So its a wonderful opportunity for people to go indie and make their own games (like my mates)
If the mean the future of games as in playablity and new things, I almost laughed out loud when I saw how this (pretty) game was controlled:
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It’s easy to say that Apple just applied a bit of marketing slap and turned a mediocre product into a must-have but it’s has to be more than that (or, at least you’d hope that).
At the moment, technology wise, it’s the most capable gaming handheld on the market. The gfx are beaten only by the PSP, the connectivity beats everything else hands down (or equals with most other mobiles which are, in themselves, poor gaming devices for other reasons).
With iPhone OS3 being launched this June (and available in Beta now), you’ll see the first of the gaming sleeves – a holder for you to slot your iPod touch or iPhone into which will give it real buttons. And then you’ll start to see some more innovations.
Frankly I see it as a real opportunity for Irish Games folks. We have folk creating games and fighting hard to be seen. The cost of entry to iPhone development is very low, the potential (especially with Irish developer networking groups like http:/xcake.org) for collaboration high and there’s already a movement to get VC money into the iPhone market. On the back of XCake we now have four universities (QUB, UU, IADT, UCC) interested in doing stuff in a formal fashion, two dev events planned for the next month and a developer conference as well. There’s a heap of funding available for this too.
It’s an opportunity and you never know, the folk telling you it’s great could actually be right.
I’m Matt Johnston and I’m an Apple fanboi *sits down*
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iPhone is just like every other platform, it has positives and negatives. For the small indies the positives are that it is relatively cheap to develop for and open as far as self-publishing goes.
The negatives are that because of the above the platform is flooded with apps, many of which are crap and it will only get worse because everyone things it is the new California gold rush. It is hard to get any sales unless you are lucky and get featured by Apple or you work really hard at getting PR by chasing up all the magazines and web sites. – Even then you may not get any column inches if they think your little indie game wont be of interest to their readers.
Just like XBLA, PSN, XBCG and all other platforms you will have a few people who win big (the guy who made $600k in a month and for each one of those you will have hundreds who make little or nothing.
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