iPhone's Game Potential As a Threat to Java Phone Games

Ian Lamont writes "In the runup to Apple's WWDC 2008, Chris Tompkins thinks that the iPhone's gaming potential 'might finally put the lackluster Java-based cell phone gaming market to death.' He cites the iPhone's use of Core Animation adapted for ARM processors, which he says allows for the advanced effects of OS X and now OpenGL-accelerated 3D games, as well as the importance of an on-demand store and Internet connection. Tompkins says that while certain genres lend themselves to the iPhone's touch controls, such as real-time strategy games (think StarCraft) the lack of physical controls will force developers to creatively approach the multitouch and accelerometer on the iPhone. His advice to Apple — make a compelling overture to independent game designers, and treat them like rock stars. Tompkins, incidentally, is one of several people who have recently pointed to Apple's mobile gaming potential."

lackluster?

[Dionysus]

The mobile gaming industry was $2.6 million industry in 2005 [3g.co.uk] and expected to be $11.2 by 2010. I suspect most of that number is java games (never seen a non-Java games, except those that came with the phone).

Maybe he's only talking about the US marked?

Re:How is the iPhone going to kill Java-based game

[Perseid]

OK, so...flamebait? WTF? I'm not suggesting the iPhone won't be capable of good games or even that there wont be good games. But Java games, crappy as a lot of them may be, are an already established, cross-platform industry. There are lots of Java-based phones. There's only one iPhone. So the iPhone will not "finally put the lackluster Java-based cell phone gaming market to death".

Re:Umm, no.

[drsquare]

When the ipod came out, the mp3 player market was empty, there was little to zero competition, and most people didn't own one. They captured the market pretty much by default.

The phone market on the other hand is completely saturated. There is a lot of tough, long-standing competition offering phones which are much better value for money. In many markets, new phones are given away 'free' with contracts, something which is incompatable with the iphone's business model.

Re:iPhone a threat to Java games? Fat chance

[Mr2001]

3. Unless all of the other mobile industry players spontaneously decide to line up behind Apple, Java is not going to lose ground to C# anytime soon as the language of choice for game developers.

Maybe you meant Objective-C? C# is Microsoft, not Apple.

Re:Umm, no.

[floppypond]

Since when is the US the only country that has CDMA phones?
There is only one carrier here that is GSM, all the others are CDMA. I live in Canada.

Re:Do you guys seriously believe this?

[4D6963]

Yup, and actually, I think the iPhone will make a pretty good handheld console once control pad addons such as this [icontrolpad.com] come out.

And they'll quickly regret it

[Sycraft-fu]

Apple is bound by the same laws of physics as all the rest of us and that means battery life. While it sounds like a great idea to use one device for everything you quickly come to realise that if you do that on your phone, you kill your talk time. You just can't have it both ways: You spend the battery on toying with it, it isn't there for a conversation, you talk on it, you don't have the battery for other stuff.

This isn't something that is problematic if you use your phone a little bit, like playing 10 minutes while waiting for a doctor's appointment, but it is if you try to use it to replace other devices. If you listen to MP3s on your phone all day, watch a video on the train ride to work, then play a game for an hour at lunch time, well you are going to find that if you need to take a long call, you are fucked, especially if you don't remember to recharge every day (which many don't). Even if the processor is super efficient, those pretty active matrix LCD screens still suck a bunch of juice.

So I don't think you'll find people giving up their DS's and iPods just because they get an iPhone. Until we find a way to significantly increase the energy density of batteries, it just isn't a good idea. Phones already have a limited enough talk time, cutting in to that in any significant manner isn't a winning idea.

Re:Umm, no.

[McFadden]

Added to which, the likelyhood of Apple even bothering about games, let alone treating game designers "like rock stars" is unlikely given their past record. This is Gabe Newell on working with Apple to develop games in the past:

Well, we tried to have a conversation with Apple for several years, and they never seemed to... well, we have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them, people there go "wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming". And then we'll say, "OK, here are three things you could do to make that better", and then they say OK, and then we never see them again. And then a year later, a new group of people show up, who apparently have no idea that the last group of people were there, and never follow though on anything. So, they seem to think that they want to do gaming, but there's never any follow through on any of the things they say they're going to do. That makes it hard to be excited about doing games for their platforms.

Re:Umm, no.

[Tony Hoyle]

Umm... no. Europe has phone standards mandated by european law. It's all GSM and UMTS (which happens to use WCDMA as an interface, but it's *not* compatible with the US CDMA system).

Re:Umm, no.

[tepples]

Did you know that the US only represents a small portion of the world?

Did you know that the US is the largest English-speaking market? Did you know that Slashdot is based in the US?

Re:Umm, no.

[Wulfstan]

Not true! Zapp in Romania (part of Europe now!) is a CDMA carrier.

http://www.zapp.ro/ [www.zapp.ro]

Re:iPhone a threat to Java games? Fat chance

[earthbound kid]

No. Your whole argument is a series of assertions that Java is big today (its not) and that therefore it can never lose market domination (it can). It's so wrong that it's irritating.

1. The iPhones market share is a tiny drop in the global bucket, even if all the Apple-loving tech media journalists would like to have you think otherwise.

So is the mobile Java market. Who the hell plays a mobile Java game on purpose? People either buy them by accident when they click the wrong thing with their phones nub, or when theyre incredibly bored and they dont have any other way of gaming.

2. iPhone game development restricts you to a MacOS development environment. This basically guarantees that even if the iPhone becomes hugely successful, its place in mobile game development will never capture more than a minority status among game developers.

Are you aware of a little thing called consoles? You dont develop for the Xbox, PlayStation, or Wii using a conventional PC setup either, but those guys seem to be doing OK. If anything, the barrier to entry for the iPhone is much lower than in those cases, since the SDK is free, and anyone who cares about their computing experience runs either a Mac or a Mac with Linux on it anyway.

3. Unless all of the other mobile industry players spontaneously decide to line up behind Apple, Java is not going to lose ground to C# anytime soon as the language of choice for game developers.

1. You dont know the difference between C# and Objective-C.
2. Java is not the language of choice for game developers. C++ is. Java is the language of choice for enterprise slaves.

4. Java is a programming language and a set of industry standards for mobile hardware, not mobile phone hardware itself. Pointing to the cool new hardware features that the iPhone supports isnt an argument against java phone games, it just points towards Apples decision not to play nice with the rest of the industry standard apps and developers out there. If anything, this decision will limit the scope iPhone-specic game development (who wants to waste their resources on such a small market segment when they can make games that will run on a much larger amount of phones out there), it doesnt pose any threat to the use of Java as a mobile game development standard. At the very least, it means that Java game developers will have to wait for Sun (or any other company) to provide a good set of translation tools that will let them develop for the iPhones hardware in Java.

If that logic were true, PC would be dominating the consoles, and no one would develop for Mac. Good developers realize that you get rich by leading the market, not following.

Re:Ummm, that's not much

[Caetel]

The actual figure in the article is $2.6 billion.

Re:Umm, no.

[KDR_11k]

Did you notice we're talking about dominating the cellphone market which the US doesn't seem to be a big part of anyway?