On merit, not monopoly
Tuesday, October 12th, 2010“Matmi founder, Jeff Coghlan, has said that Apple would be ‘crazy’ to block the use of middleware from iPhone development, with Unity boss David Helgason questioning how well Steve Jobs’ firm grasps how games are made.”
Quoted from ‘Games Industry dot biz.’
It was slightly unnerving to become an overnight spokesperson in the debate on the use of third party development tools (ie – non-Apple tools) on the iPhone platform. That was July this year, and Matmi had just experienced the situation at first-hand developing the three-part “Escape to Plastic Beach” game for Gorillaz/EMI.
For the revenue-strapped music industry, the final chapter of this game is the most important. The previous two (free) chapters exist to tempt players into parting with money to play the final eight-level extravaganza in a 3D recreation of the band’s Plastic Beach HQ. The most cost-effective way to develop it was to use a cross-compiler taking in online browsers and the iPhone/iPad platforms. We chose Unity 3D middleware for its technical and graphical capabilities, 3D engine and ease-of-use.
Apple had been making noises for the last few months about how the quality of games and apps on its mobile platforms would be compromised with the use of cross-compilers. That might be true for apps, but not for games.
Games are a complex and intense form of software development that take weeks and months to achieve a high quality result. Burdening developers with a double development cost for Apple platforms and “everything else” would put prices up and hurt users in the end – the very people that Apple purports to champion.
And anyway, as a developer, I don’t like being restricted and dictated to by the owner of the hardware platform. Big as you are, Apple, this is what you are. Remember the ‘open systems movement’ of the 1980s? You were a big supporter of users having choice back then (and 30 years later, I was struggling to come to terms with a possible U-turn on that policy).
Happily, Apple has decided to continue to authorise middleware-developed games and apps into the App Store. Perhaps they realised (sensibly) that if they don’t support cross-platform development tools, someone else will (cue Google Android).
Developers have breathed a sigh of relief because the decision has a huge effect on costs and game availability. Sure, there are times when only hard-coded, single-platform development will do (speed, graphics, quality, etc). But at least with these tools on board, developers have the choice to create multi-platform games, cost-effectively in a short space of time.
Interestingly for Matmi, that may be only half the story because our attention has now turned to Adobe. We’ve built our reputation on cutting-edge Flash games for a decade, but I have deep reservations about the suitability of Flash for mobile platforms. It’s highly memory and processor intensive, and Adobe doesn’t seem to be heeding developers’ call for improvement.
C’mon you guys! You may be big and successful and a household name – but don’t trade on being a monopoly. Merit is what gets you noticed in the Internet Age, so forget the board of directors because consumers will make the ultimate decision. Time to get busy – at listening.
