iPhone/iTouch to revolutionize portable gaming or no?

[Kadath]

Was pretty interesting reading Engadget's liveblog of the SDK release today. One of the most intriguing things was learning that both of these have 3D accelerometers in them. So what do you think, is this a big deal for portable and mac gaming or not so much?

[Charles]

When they are < $150, available in all territories, and don't require being locked in to a shitty plan with a shitty phone provider, they might have half a chance of having a chance of being reasonably decent for gaming.

Till then, I'm going to just go with "nope".

[stusser]

The touch screen is well-suited to some genres like puzzle and adventure games, but not so much for anything involving precise movement or twitch reactions. It certainly won't revolutionize anything and it won't compete with the PSP, much less the DS as a gaming platform.

[nKoan]

I dunno. I can say I am excited by the prospect though. The Touch keeps getting better and better.

/now if only I could make phone calls with it, it'd be perfect.

[rjcc]

revolutionize? no. could be a surprisingly good gaming platform? yeah

[Wholly Schmidt]

It's exciting for someone who was going to buy one anyway, or already has one. It's a non event for anyone who already thought $400-500 was silly for a phone/iPod.

[malkav11]

I don't see it. The thing is, if you want to innovate with touch-screen controls and the like, there's the DS, with a huge installed base, especially in Japan, and a low price point as handheld gadgets go. The iPhone/iPod Touch may well be more powerful and have a hard drive, but there's nothing revolutionary about that. And they're not aimed specifically at gamers, have a much lower base, and cost through the fucking nose. The PSP has struggled as a gaming device, and it does all that multimedia stuff at less than half the price. (Albeit with less storage, absent owning a whole lot of memory sticks.)

[CharlesC]

The iPhone has two things that make it different than the other handhelds, the accelerometer and multi-touch.

[stusser]

The DS is better suited as a gaming machine and has a huge installed base, true, but the iPhone has several major points in its favor:

1) The devkit costs $100 and no lengthy certification process etc.
2) Publishing is free and you get a flat 70% of all revenue.
3) Internet access is guaranteed, albeit somewhat slow, so you can integrate community features, high score lists, latency/bandwidth-friendly multiplayer, and so on.
4) These people blew $400 on a phone, what's another twenty bucks for your arkanoid clone?!

[Jason Cross]

I don't think it'll "revolutionize" portable gaming, but maybe have a big impact on cell phone gaming.

The disruptive parts are these:

1. All you need to develop apps is a Mac (looks like the tools are Mac-only right now), an iPhone to test on (though there is an emulator), and if you want to publish 'em, $99 to be part of the dev network. It seems a helluva lot like the XNA Creators Club stuff in that regard. No custom hardware dev kits to pay big bucks for or beg the platform holder for.

2. Apps will be delivered through an on-phone software store, which will also manage updates. Kinda like Xbox Live Arcade, really. You browse the software, download, and play all from the phone. Of course you can also do it through iTunes and sync it to your phone, but that's not very disruptive. Other phones do this, but it's a super-shitty interface (ALWAYS, jesus!) and there's no one-stop shop for all software. This built-in software store is going to be the one and only place to find all the software. No retail, no third-party sites, etc. Again, very XBLA-like and not a lot like other phones or portable devices.

3. The business arrangements are great for devs. If you put out freeware, there is no cost for Apple to host and distribute it so you don't get saddled with big bandwidth costs or hosting fees on your free app. If you charge money, it's a 70/30 split (with Apple taking 30%). A lot like the XBLA days, until recently.

4. It's got a built-in camera, accelerometer, vibrate, microphone, and multitouch screen. There are lots of creative possibilities for games to combine these. As a demo, they had Sega showing Super Monkey Ball where you tilt the iPhone to control the ball. That's only the very simplest, least creative application of it. I picture a game built around these features...a location-based scavenger hunt that requires you to take pictures that are uploaded to a web site, "shaking" the iPhone clean in an RPG or reorienting it to cast spells or use abilities, touch-enabled game where you "feel" out areas of the screen using the vibration for haptic feedback, etc. Combine the capabilities and you will get a lot of gimmicky crap (see: Wii) but also some really unique games that change the way we interact with them (see: Wii).

5. You effectively have "always online" access through the cell network. Granted, at very reduced bandwidth relative to WiFi (it's got that too), but games that only need to trickle up or down some simple stats could reach the cloud almost anywhere. Adjunct games to "full-sized" PC or console games that let you carry persistant XP, gold, characters, cars, whatever are more useful when the 10 minutes you spend playing on the bus don't have to be "synced up" on WiFi once you get home.

malkav11 - there are no hard drives in iPhones/Touches. Just flash memory. But that's splitting hairs. :)

Also, it fits in your pocket. The DS and PSP are small, but not quite "always in my pocket" size.

If Apple can manage to get the price down to $250 or so over the next year, it could be a pretty killer platform. Hopefully they won't just keep adding memory while maintaining the $400 price.

[nKoan]

Touches do not have a built in camera, vibrate or microphone. I hope they don't make games that are iPhone only.

Also, no 'always-online' access on the Touches (unless you are always near a WiFi hotspot).

[Gendal]

It's definitely expensive, but it's also a Phone and an iPod. I don't see all the PSP and DS users dropping their handhelds to go purchase one but think how easy it will be to sell a game to them. iPhone user X sees iPhone user Y playing a cool game and asks them how they got it. Instead of user X having to go hunt down the store they can just download it on the spot once user Y tells them the name. That's it, just the name.

They already have an iTunes account for their music, so why not games? Toss in 3D accelerated graphics, a 3D accelerometer, and multitouch and I think phone games could go from the confusing mess of garbage that is today to once again, a virtual Apple monopoly.

Apple saw the music industry sucking their thumb and looking confused and swept in to eat their lunch. Now it's the mobile phone companies turn with apps and games.

[Jason Cross]

Touches do not have a built in camera, vibrate or microphone. I hope they don't make games that are iPhone only.

Also, no 'always-online' access on the Touches (unless you are always near a WiFi hotspot).

Hmm... that's true. But I still think you can safely make an app requiring those features and not cut out too much of your market. Touches are selling, but from what I understand the iPhones are far more popular.

I forgot one:

5. One hardware platform. Right now all the iPhones/Touches, as far as I know, have the same CPU, running at the same speed, with the same cache, the same screen resolution, the same OpenGL hardware acceleration features, etc. Developing games for other mobile networks is a nightmare of hardware differences that imposes some pretty big compromises in game design, not to mention a really annoying amount of testing (or performance-sapping abstraction layers). I hope when the 3G models come out, they are essentially the same from a CPU/graphics standpoint, making the variance between models only cellular network speed and storage space.

[nKoan]

Hmm... that's true. But I still think you can safely make an app requiring those features and not cut out too much of your market. Touches are selling, but from what I understand the iPhones are far more popular.

That is probably true. I guess as long as we know ahead of time if an app takes advantage of anything iPhone specific (or for that matter, Touch specific, if anything like that exists) it won't be a huge deal.

[RickH]

I have zero confidence in Apple's ability to support a gaming platform. As in, I'll believe it when I see it.

Look at the games section on iTunes and try to figure out which games play on which iPods (hint: upgrade and you'll leave anything you bought behind) to get a feel for Apple's regard for games.

[Jazar]

So how good is the 3D capability of the iPhone?

[Jason Cross]

I have zero confidence in Apple's ability to support a gaming platform. As in, I'll believe it when I see it.

Look at the games section on iTunes and try to figure out which games play on which iPods (hint: upgrade and you'll leave anything you bought behind) to get a feel for Apple's regard for games.

This is exactly why I think the stability of the iPhone platform is a big deal, and hope it continues. iPods have different form factors, screen sizes, processors, etc. So the gaming market is too fragmented on them. The iPhone has a chance to stabilize that, for the time being. Provided they don't start dramatically changing hardware capabilities every year.

As for support - this is a very different market than the Mac, where they're up against the PC for games development. On the Mac, to be relevant, Apple needs a lot more market share for one. Beyond that, they need good game-centric APIs like DirectInput, DirectSound (OpenAL would fit the bill), and software development tools aimed at game development. They do a piss poor job of that right now.

But this is the mobile phone market. In one fell swoop they have delivered development tools (environment, emulator, debugger, profiling) on par with pretty much any other phone platform on the market. But more importantly, they delivered arguably a better market by making an in-phone and on-computer one-stop digital download service for all software and a very generous revenue split. Compare that to dealing with the pantheon of other jacked-up phones, phone operating systems, development environments, and business deals with carriers, and it's really significant.

Here's what John Carmack had to say about it on Slashdot:


We (Id) have put in our application like everyone else, so I don't have any inside information at this point. I think Steve is still pissed at me over some negative comments I made about iPod development tools a while ago. Just based on the blurbs, it looks very good -- a simulator plus debugging on the native device is the best of both worlds, and a 70% royalty deal for apps over iTunes is quite good.

The iTunes distribution channel is really a more important aspect than a lot of people understand. The ability to distribute larger applications than the over-the-air limits and effectively market your title with more than a dozen character deck name, combined with the reasonable income split make this look like a very interesting market. This type of developer / customer interaction is probably the wave of the future for mobile devices, it will be interesting to see how quickly the other players can react. Based on our experiences with the carriers, I am betting not very quickly.

The least of the iPhones has 4GB of storage. You can safely make an iPhone game a couple hundred megs big, knowing that users can easily handle that over WiFi or get it on their computers and sync. And you don't have to make deals with carriers at all, letting them determine pricing and rake you over the coals. You just develop whatever you want, charge $10 or $15 or whatever, submit it to Apple, and get a check monthly for 70% of that. That just destroys the current mobile game market. Badly.

It's not "can Apple support the game market." It's "can they do it better than Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, NTT DoCoMo, LG, Motorola, Nokia, etc. If even half of what they announced today is true, they already have.

[Jason Cross]

So how good is the 3D capability of the iPhone?

Hard to say. The Samsung chip in iPhones/Touches is a system-on-chip type device integrating an ARM11 CPU and PowerVR MBX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR) graphics. It appears that it's the full MBX, not MBX Lite, but there seems to be some debate about that - I'm sure now that the SDK is out it'll get cleared up.

It's the 4th-gen tile base renderer, and they're up to 5th gen now (but I don't think there are many/any devices using it). At the 620MHz CPU speed of the iPhone, you should probably be able to get graphics somewhere around the Dreamcast or N64. But so much is dependent on memory bottlenecks, cache sizes, operating overhead, and so on. It should, y'know, play Quake fine.

Now that the SDK is out, I look forward to YouTube videos from devs showing off what kind of 3D mojo they can get out of it.

[Kael]

Voted no because the controller aspects are lacking. If it can offer an alternate control method it may having something.

One game that I think would have a ton of promise on the iPhone would be a Rock Band style singer mode game. The iPhone acts as the microphone, has songs local, etc. That could be a pretty cool little app.

Outside of using voice recog as a control method I dont think there is much promise.

[Perco]

So how good is the 3D capability of the iPhone?
It's pretty good. Here's Super Monkey Ball (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFj0xlzmf6Q) running on it. Here's Spore (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5xA8-XvjNk). Keep in mind that both of these were developed in two weeks. Want higher resolution video? Check out the full keynote (http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/rtp20e92/event/index.html?internal=fj2l3s9dm). The Spore demo starts at 45:30, SMB starts at the 1 hour mark. There's also Apple's own Touch Fighter which starts at the 41 minute mark.

[Rob O'Boston]

I'd like to see what Vic Davis could do with this. Armageddon Empires already runs on the Mac, so is part of the work already done? Even a AE-lite would be really cool on the iPhone.

[Chuck Jordan]

I don't think it'll "revolutionize" portable gaming, but maybe have a big impact on cell phone gaming.
Agreed, at least for the near future. But I'd guess that it has the potential to make "portable gaming" and "cell phone gaming" start to converge.

Based on the presentation, the hardware isn't that much of an issue; it's the market. Like people have said, a $400 phone -- even one that includes a video iPod -- just isn't going to reach the same audience as a < $150 Nintendo DS. So I'd predict you're going to see a few downsized ports of handheld games (like the ones shown today from the usual suspects like EA), and then a TON of PopCap-like games.

I've already got a ton of ideas for possible games (that of course I'd never be able to implement), so no doubt there are more imaginative and industrious folks than I am already working on them. The capabilities of the multi-touch screen and the wireless connectivity alone add hundreds of possibilities.

I'd guess the biggest hit is the lack of external media. Will people be willing to sacrifice their music or video storage to hold anything the size of a typical PSP or DS-sized game?

Edit: Plus I wish Sony would do a port of "Patapon" for the iPhone so I could finally put my PSP back into storage where it belongs. But I suppose that's like wishing for a Zelda game to come out on the 360.

[Gendal]

I'd like to see what Vic Davis could do with this. Armageddon Empires already runs on the Mac, so is part of the work already done? Even a AE-lite would be really cool on the iPhone.
Nope, AE is built in Flash I believe, and the iPhone/iTouch still doesn't have it, nor is it likely to any time soon. Add in resolution differences and you would pretty much have to do a full on port.

[WarrenM]

Accelerometer + camera + touch interface + iTunes-like store == monster win.

[Coca Cola Zero]

I agree with stusser, et al. The lack of a more traditional input device is a huge problem if you look at this just from a gaming perspective.

When the DS first came out, pretty much every game tried to focus on the touch input and pretty much every game sucked. It wasn't until developers started calming down and using the dpad a lot more and only using touch where it made sense to do so that DS games came into their own. The Wii has a similiar problem with motion controls with few third parties doing a good job merging traditional and motion controls, thus flooding the market with samey minigame collections.

I'm sure we'll see some pretty great games come out that take advantage of the unique properties of the iPhone/iTouch and a lot of games that are clones or ports of the best DS touch screen heavy games, but I don't see why the iPhone would usher in some new utopia in portable gaming and won't get stuck in a rut like the DS was when everyone was trying to overuse touch or like the Wii is where everyone is trying to overuse motion control. What you're basically looking at in simplified terms is DS+Wii+EyeToy(but only if on iPhone, not on iTouch), so it does maybe have some nice crossover input potential that none of those systems has alone, but for balanced gaming I'd trade any single one of those in for a more standard controller and button, even if just one.

[stusser]

Well it does have one button. But yeah.

[Munin]

I see the lack of buttons as highly problematic for anything twitch-based, which, in the context of mobile phones games, should be about 80% of all titles. I've never used an iPhone, but I can only imagine that it must suck to use virtual buttons with no physical response. So...

[stusser]

It does, which just means they concentrate on puzzle games, RPGs, adventure games, etc.

[DennyA]

Speaking of revolutions, I just want Civilization: Revolution on it. That's the only game anyone needs to develop.

[Joel]

Puzzle Quest.

[Chuck Jordan]

I see the lack of buttons as highly problematic for anything twitch-based, which, in the context of mobile phones games, should be about 80% of all titles.
80%? I haven't been paying attention to mobile phone games, but I still can't imagine it'd be that high. Isn't it mostly variants of match-3 games and Tetris clones and the like?

I'd guess exactly the opposite ratio: the large majority games won't be twitch-based, if only because the iPhone audience skews older.

If anything gets overused, it's going to be the accelerometer-based movement. The touch screen isn't a real problem; worst case you just pop a D-pad and A & B buttons onto the screen.

And I want to put in another vote for Civilization on the iPhone, too.

[Darniaq]

Some games on the jailbroken side get around the lack of buttons thing by, like, putting buttons on the screen :) Not sure how much tactile feedback matters to ya all, but onscreen buttons are good enough for typing and for playing Balderdash.

Most mobile games require little more than the 2 4 6 8 "d-pad", 5 for select, and universal support for phone calls. Transposing those buttons to an iPhone is cakewalk, and you still end up with screen with more dot count.

I voted no above because of Apple though. They've never been as interested in games as in convincing people they're a serious system. Which is a shame, because they are a serious system already. It's great to see some promised game support from the big companies, but I suspect most of the iFund will go to enterprise and other business/telecom applications.

Games are for kids. Or so they seem convinced.

I do wonder if this means the jailbreak side is effectively dead. I personally feel like there's still room for folks who don't want deal with Apple the content aggregator. But who knows...

[stusser]

Yes, they even put a full-blown NES emulator on it with the entire controller depicted. But in practice without tactile feedback it was nearly impossible to play.

[Spasticon]

Uh. The ipod 3rd party hardware market is fairly developed.

Who says they can't build some kind of porta-cradle that adds a dpad and an a/b button?

[stusser]

Because apple isn't letting SDK apps touch additional hardware via the dock connector, according to the presentation this thread is based upon.

[Spasticon]

That doesn't mean that apple itself won't write a new cocoa touch api or something like that to allow for that type of hardware. iPhone 2.1 perhaps?

I'd actually expect they to do something to allow external keyboards before they do an addon gamepad... at least if they want to be taken a little more seriously when it comes to corporate usage.