March 3rd, 2009 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Analysis & Editorial | 3 Comments »
Nic Watt, the founder of a small game development studio called Nnooo, has voiced his opinion on the ease of developing iPhone titles. The developer thinks that it is lowering the quality Benchmark.
Nic explains his vision on this subject during an interview with Develop Magazine. When he was asked about the advantages of developing mobile games for the iPhone, he said;
Each platform has its pros and cons. The iPhone makes it very easy to make a game and get it to market quickly as there are much fewer hoops to jump through in comparison with the Wii. On the iPhone we make the game, age rate it through Apple’s submission site and wait for Apple to certify us. On the Wii we must liaise with all of the various ratings agencies around the world and pay their fees
A very valid point. The easy of development and the easy reach to many by anyone is right now making the iphone slowly fall into the bandwagon of less quality games. It wont be quite long when the appstore will showcase a huge game portfolio with tons of games (both good and bad) amongst which the best ones will be lost. I say the minimum price should be atleast 6$ which will make the buyer think twice to invest rather than downloading crap material.
Personally I’ve made quite a bit of cash in iPhone land and those that complain about it are usually the ones that are not making much out of it themselves perhaps?
This platform is the best thing to come along for the small indie developer in an age and I love the fact that there is so much choice and competition… the wheat always gets sorted from the chaff in this type of senario anyway so I’m not really sure why there are any problems.
Nintendo can keep their closed loop dev cycle now – I’m not interested anymore really.
Meanwhile good money is being made so I say leave it all well alone – sorry 😀
I guess that when more or less most developers can submit their Apps you’ll see the good, the bad, and the ugly App appear. Agree with Adrian that the competition is a good thing and in most cases quality and good ideas will find its way up.
Lets enjoy the fact that in a mobile market dominated by branded games only (he what quality did we see here?) with limited publisher gaining access, we finally see a model in which many developers get their chance.
Cheers, from the ATC development team.