May 5th, 2008 by Arjan Olsder Posted in 1 | No Comments »
With the release of Microsoft’s XNA Studio 3.0, another device is added to the mobile gaming family. Now, developers can start bringing their mobile games to Microsoft’s Zune device.
Porting to the Zune is especially easy for companies that traditionally are bringing games to the Windows or XBLA environment using previous XNA Studio versions. The API’s should be about 95% the same over all platforms according to Microsoft.
According to an article on Gamasutra, the real problems for Zune gaming lay in the lack of 3D hardware acceleration. The Zune is however pretty fast with displaying 2D graphics. Other API’s that developers can use, allow the mobile game to discover music on the device. This means a big number of music files is available as background music, just like in official iPhone games.
So with this release of XNA Game Studio, Microsoft sets another step in order to compete with the iPhone. For developers that are already getting thoughts about publishing games onto the device, there is one big problem at the moment though. The device is hardly available outside of the USA, while the iPhone is a global phenomenon. This seriously limits the target audience.
Read all (sponsored) details on developing for the Zune on Gamasutra.
