Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

(Unverified)Mar 7th 2010 2:21PM

Highest Ranked

I think you've missed the point of 1) what MS are proposing here and 2) what's made the iPhone such a successful gaming platform. As pointed out by other commentators, the MS demo happened to show gaming as an example, but it wasn't the focus of the technology on show, and neither should it be.

The iPhone has blown the other mobile phones out of the water precisely because it offers a unified platform, along with the iPod Touch. The games are designed with it in mind. I don't want a scaled down version of a PC or Xbox Game with botched controls on my phone. They're completely different usage scenarios. On one, I'm sitting down, at home, and I have ample time to focus on the game. When I'm gaming on my phone it's for short bursts, and the games have to be designed with that in mind. Until the iPhone, this point seemed largely lost on most mobile games developers.

Just because something can be done, doesn't mean that it should be done.

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(Unverified)Mar 7th 2010 10:37PM

Neutral

I think Eric Rudder demonstrates this point nicely in the video from the previous article around 0:40 when he shows the game on the phone and dies immediately ..

Nonetheless, there's huge potential for having a mobile versions of Desktop games; have characters and/or levels that can only be accessed on the mobile version, ancillary features, content and mini games, etc ..

BTW Sebastian is a shameless attention seeker .. Gaming on OSX is set to blossom regardless of what MS does purely because the user base of OSX is only getting bigger.

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(Unverified)Mar 7th 2010 10:41PM

Low Ranked

Good points, essjay :)

Hazard -- come now, I might be shameless, but I'm not an attention seeker. Low blow!

'Blossoming' is a good word. Just remember the market share of Mac vs. Windows. Yes, gaming is about to blossom on OS X, but only relative to its self. It's still tiny compared to Windows -- and the better question is whether developers will invest money into OS X. I don't see why they would, given the choice... but maybe!

(This is all moot really, because the main growth sector is frickin' social Flash games. The numbers dwarf everything else by a huge margin.)

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