Saturday, November 7, 2009

Apple Slowly Realizing It Sells A Potential Game Platform

Id Software's John Carmack sheds some light on what top tier game developers see when interacting with Apple.

Despite demonstrating the iPhone's UI and development environment to the public so as to highlight the platform's game potential, Apple apparently doesn't think about the iPhone and iPod Touch as a game machine.

Earth to Apple: the fact your platform rocks for games doesn't mean it can't be tops for other real-time applications closer to your heart. The fact that there's a market for high-end game consumers who want top-notch hardware to rock their favorite software should make you lick your chops, not roll your eyes. Just go with it.

Like Apple's apparent blindness to the enterprise market, Apple's deep disbelief that it should work toward enhancing Apple's products for their potential use as game machines is frankly hard to credit. So, get over it already. The new platform is great for making sure people get the right fraction of cycles into the right parts of an application, and making sure that all the 2D, 3D, 5.1 surround, and stereo video is supported by top-tier APIs is as good for games as it is for video editing, rendering special effects, and so on.

You've built it. Let 'em come.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Right on! Lest we forget, one of the greatest selling video games of all time, Myst, was born on the Apple platform in 1993. The game was made available from the iTunes App Store on May 2, 2009.