In the interview he describes the iPhone and App Store as a disruptive element in the ecosystem (my words) which involves several fundamental shifts from the way things have been done in the past.

…more than half the time the average iPhone is in use, it’s being used for something other than making a telephone call. If you think about that concept, that is a fundamental shift.

…from a performance standpoint, is pretty close to a PSP, but unlike the PSP, it’s got a touchscreen, accelerometers, a camera, it’s location-aware, it’s got all of your media on it, it’s awake with you, it’s always on, and it’s always connected to the network. So if you think about the types of games and entertainment experiences that you can build on a platform like that, it’s got to get pretty exciting pretty quickly.

…if you think about what Apple’s doing with the App Store, they’re really turning mobile on its ear. They allow you to control the pricing yourself. They’re taking a distribution fee for distributing your software, but they’re really allowing users to choose what to put on their phone and how they want to enhance their device. And that is a fundamental shift.

The company has three roles:

So commissioning, financing, and producing titles ourselves, that’s the first party. Then there’s the second party, which is looking to the independent developer community and asking ourselves, “What great ideas are out there that need to be funded and financed?”
And lastly, it’s a third party for people who don’t necessarily need our producing experience or our financing, but the opportunity to work with us within an ecosystem

As Ngmoco will be a publisher more than a developer, it allows them to spot interesting games that might want to move to other mobile platforms as they become available - migrating the software to Android or the new ‘open’ Symbian operating system when it appears. It’s all about spotting the intellectual property and getting it licensed and published in order to maximise return and providing their previous expertise in order to make the most of it. Potentially very profitable if iPhone sales estimates are to be believed (6 million iPhone 1.0 sold already, 14 million iPhone 3G predicted in latter half of 2008 and 24 million iPhone 3G predicted for 2009)

From what I can see, Ngmoco’s job will be mostly to introduce new developers to the cut-throat gaming market.

The games industry says British universities are failing to equip graduates with the skills it needs. The warning comes from the industry campaign group “Games Up?”, which says games developers in Britain are facing a serious skills shortage. The lobby group says there are now 81 video games degree courses at British universities. But only four are accredited by Skillset, the government body which monitors such courses.

The courses available would be a factor but do you need a degree to be an ace in anything?

I don’t think so. I think the Games Lobby could work to reduce the cost of entry to the gaming market. For instance, the cost of a development kit for the Sony Playstation Portable is £50,000 for hardware alone and an extra £5,000 per person for the tools. Additional software like Renderman might add thousands more to the tally and this is all before you figure in salaries.[1]

This barrier to entry is not insignificant. If hackers in the home cannot work on these things, if universities cannot afford these costs or if students can’t work on them part time, then they are not going to develop the skills to compete in this marketplace.

Microsoft has given some lip service to this criticism with the XNA Game Studio Express. For $99 a year, you can transport code onto your XBox 360. This isn’t going to be the same as a full developer kit (I mean, you’re not going to cloning Halo 3 with it) but I know of some people who have been hired based on the quality of their XNA Community contributions. Reading the specifications, it really provides an interesting alternative.

That said, the market can be extremely profitable. While an edge case, Halo 3 cost around $50 million to develop but took in $170 million in sales on the first day. Compare this to Pacman - Atari spent around $100,000 to develop for the Video Computer System but made $300 Million back. costs of development are undoubtedly spiralling.

It’s not all doom and gloom. Nintendo hopes to offer development kits for as little as £1732 per developer and Sony does offer development kits to some schools and colleges at a cut price.

I think that Android and the iPhone will start to pave the way here - they offer free development kits, the iPhone offers hardware in excess of the PSP or Nintendo DS Lite (and presumably shipping Android hardware will be comparable) and they’ll make it really easy to buy and download new software (as we’ve seen already with iPhone).

It will be up to educators, lobbyists, interested civil servants and enterpreneurs to bridge this gap.

[1] Source: The Northern Ireland Digital Content Strategy (InvestNI)

Touch Arcade writes:
Apple Poised to Snatch the Crown from Nintendo’s DS

Combine this seamless distribution model with beefy gaming hardware–a CPU that’s over six times the combined clockspeed of the DS’s processors (and nearly twice the clockspeed of the PSP’s) and a screen with 50% more area than that of the DS’s dual screens combined–and you’ve got a winner, right?

I’d have thought by now that people, especially people who follow Apple, would have realised that specifications do not a success make. How many times has the iPod bucked the trend and beaten other players soundly even though it sports relatively meagre specifications?

Apple has kitted out the iPhone to compete with other smartphones and, perhaps to a lesser degree, subnotebooks. I certainly find it a lot more pleasurable to type on my iPhone than on my eeePC laptop keyboard. And yes, there will be a heap of games released for this new platform, but you have to ask yourself - is it truly a gaming platform - the answer is simply No.

It’s a good game. You should try it.

Anyone who keeps track of how many PCs the “Gamer PC” vendors sell each year could tell you that it’s insane to develop a game explicitly for hard core gamers. Insane. I think people would be shocked to find out how few hard core gamers there really are out there. This data is available. The number of high end graphics cards sold each year isn’t a trade secret (in some cases you may have to get an NDA but if you’re a partner you can find out). So why are companies making games that require them to sell to 15% of a given market to be profitable? In what other market do companies do that? In other software markets, getting 1% of the target market is considered good.

This tells me:

1. Copy protection is worthless and every minute you spend making the most complex anti-copy mechanism possible is a minute you’re not filling your game with awesomeness.
2. Total user base is irrelevant and you need to think only of the people, in that userbase, who will buy.
3. I really should consider trying out Sins of a Solar Empire using CrossOver Games

Oh noes!
I need more free time!

There are two kinds of Linux users. Political and Technical.

The Political Linux user will have long abandoned any technology which hasn’t reached his or her standards of political extremism. They’ll have removed all Windows partitions and yet resent their bank for not catering to their minority needs and the iTunes store and themselves for wanting doohickeys like iPods. They’re the ones with the various shades of window manager and boasting about how power management works. Easy to spot. Easy to lose in a café too (just close your MacBook and leave. They’ll take a minute or six to shut down and get packed up.

The Technical user will, of course, be expedient with his or her use of technology. They’ll likely use a MacBook of some shape or size (because, you know, if you don’t you’re some sort of weirdo) which may or may not dual-boot to Linux or Windows. The only reason they have Windows is for their bank or maybe so they can actually play some decent games.

Of course, neither of these definitions explains exactly why there are so few games for Linux. It could be the (entirely correct) perception that Linux users don’t pay money for software. That’ll be a big one right there. And while companies can make a buck selling support for Linux as an operating system, selling support for games isn’t going to go far as people just hacked off when a game doesn’t perform.

What I wonder, however, is why there hasn’t been some sort of “x86 gaming platform” invented. I mean, almost all the hardware out there runs on x86 based machines now. Why not engineer a solution not dissimilar to the PlayStation where the OS was loaded from the disk at the same time as the game? Why hasn’t Intel pulled their finger out? We’d end up with a system where we bought CDs and DVDs, maybe even USB keys, with a base Linux kernel that would autodetect the hardware, run the drivers and autoload the game. The entire game would almost be copied into RAM and there’s your solution. Reboot to play, takes a few seconds to boot and doesn’t require using Windows.

Right. That’s the hard bit thought of. I’ll leave the easy bits (the technical side, the code, hardware, distribution, licensing, advertising and sales) to others.

The latest tirade is all about online content theft as someone rips off YML wholesale and pushes it as their own. How can people think this is okay? Worse - how can they remotely think they’re going to get away with it.

A few years ago when I was writing, we attended conventions in order to get some copies sold that would hopefully pay for our tickets, take in some games, buy some new games from other exhibitors and generally try to enjoy ourselves. We’d set up a trade stall, lay out the games and have someone sitting behind the desk to rake in the pennies. It more or less meant we made books in order to have a reserved seat at a convention and have somewhere to put our stuff.

At the time, we got a lot of people coming to talk to us. Some people told us they were trying to get started in making games and I did my best to help their realism out. The reason I bought a round of drinks was because of the day job. It paid for the accommodation and the car. And the books I bought. The “writing roleplaying games thing” barely paid for itself even though none of us were salaried from it. As long as you accepted that, things were cool. We’d also get a stream of people wanting to tell us about the games they ran with our books or wanting us to run sessions. Great - I was always a little apprehensive but if you pried me out of the shadows, I enjoyed myself. And lastly there were a few people who wanted to get their books signed by the authors.

Now, it may be surprising to some but I’m actually a pretty shy and retiring kind of guy. Sure, I play the boisterous, loud idiot a lot but that’s not the real me. I usually had to be coaxed into signing books because, well, I was shy. The thing that angered me was how many other people who had not contributed a single word to the content, nor art, nor handed in proofreads, nor done any work on layout would be first in line to sign the books. More fool me for allowing my own work to be “shared” that way and for not speaking up at the time but then I’m not really into conflict that way (and I’m even less into direct conflict now than I was then).

It annoyed me to the extent that it was a primary factor in my ditching of Crucible Design and starting up LateGaming. I just could not justify writing another word which would be shared in that way around workshy slackers. And as the years went on, it seemed the number of slackers increased. I viewed it as people taking credit for the nights I slaved at the keyboard. Taking credit for the work I put in. And compounded by the fact that when the book was finished, printed and in the hands of the group, they were often first with their criticisms - criticisms that should have been aired long before the book went to print. In that way they failed to do their jobs (proof), managed to get what they wanted (the fame?) and managed to get a dig in too (look, you spelled that work wrong…)

I’ve relinquished my anger about it now but still retain some bitterness about the events. Changes in my life have meant that I no longer see the people involved in Crucible Design - some I miss, and some I don’t.

That’s my rant over.

John also writes:

Sidenote the second: He’s charging 50 fucking pounds sterling an hour to help set up a firewall!?! I hope there aren’t that many suckers in GB, but if there are, I’m emigrating!

It’s a very different market here in the UK, John, and while the exchange rate might indicate a brilliant return (due to the US Administration ruining their own economy so that dollar paper is worth less than quilted toilet paper, sheet for sheet), the cost of living here is much higher and the population is very small. C’mon over.

One area that I’d love to see some work in would be gaming on iPod touch and iPhone. John Carmack has criticised the iPhone already in this area despite not seeing the SDK and not knowing therefore what Apple’s strategy was for gaming on the iPhone.

Casual Games work because they can be picked up and dropped off. SIMCity and SIMTower (the less complex version and include SIMAnt here) were the olden days versions of Tamagotchis. They were games that you could spend an hour or ten minutes messing with and then wander off for a few hours. Come back and then see where it had got to. Tamagotchis had the same thing but with a little more tech and a little more demanding on the attention. Ignore the little device with the little animal and it died. So sad, too bad. Nothing was more fun than coming back to SIMtower and seeing that floors 9-13 had cockroach infestations and 24-30 had a fire about half an hour after you left it. So, you’d repair the problems and then wander off for dinner.

Attention is the resource we’re striving for. But we’re not looking to completely capture it.

Games like Strategy, racing games and FPS require absolute attention. We’re talking about games that will run on a phone so people might be just trying to kill time while waiting for someone to come out of a shop. So the games have to let you in quickly. There also has to be a SaveState or not much of a penalty for dumping a game. Games which require you to drop back to arbitrary save points are a pain - and why would you as a developer of entertainment want to cause your viewers pain? That would be like a TV programmer, after each commercial, show the last minute of what happened before the commercial. I’ve seen this done in the US….and I didn’t like it.

It’s a bit like Splash screens in games. Man - how annoying are the splash screens in Battlefield 2142? Yes, we know it’s EA. Yes, we know some company called DICE had something to do with it. After the first time, we don’t care who made it. At least on most Mac versions of games you can delve into the bundle and ditch the movies which make up the splash screens and the game just continues on. Saved us from the overly long sequences in the Mac version of Halo I can tell ya. These are only slightly less annoying than companies which insist on showing you splash screens after the game is finished. You quit out only to be hit by an advert. Thanks but no thanks.

We’re looking to grab the attention, hold the attention and be able to release attention quickly. So our game must load fast, not be in your face too long, and get you into gameplay as soon as possible. And when done - it should allow you to exit quickly.

The best game award went to Bioshock but then it’s quite amazing that the Wii did as well considering the bluster about how it’s underpowered compared to the XBOX 360 and PS3.

The Wii breaks us away from the small cluster of buttons and joysticks which had become the trademark of consoles for years. Reviewing the innovation present in the Wii, it could only have come from Nintendo, a company with a long history of innovation in gameplay. The XBOX 360 may get some kudos for having Bioshock but really, is the success of that game anything to do with the console? It’s just another FPS to be honest in those terms - the win comes from the design and plot.

Wii delivers on several levels being both broad and deep in its appeal. Even though I barely get time to play these days, it’s the only recent console on the market that is definitely value for money.