Theorizing a Big Apple Push Into Gaming

Ian Lamont writes "Terrence Russell has outlined an interesting theory about what industry Apple intends to break into next. He points to games. Forget Pippin II, or an iMac gaming rig — he thinks the mobile realm is where Apple will make a big product push. It's not the first bit of speculation about Apple's renewed interest in gaming, but Russell's theory may have more legs, considering Apple's invitation to develop games on the iPhone SDK, its strong mobile product line, and a Apple trademark extension filed three months ago."

Re:I'm definitely not knowledgeable with Mac, but.

[larry bagina]

Unless you're talking about hunt the wumpus or curses-based tetris, it doesn't do jack shit for Linux.

Re:I'm definitely not knowledgeable with Mac, but.

[omeomi]

If Mac had a stronger stranglehold on gaming and depending on how things go, isn't Apple based off Unix?

Apple OSX is based of BSD, so yes, indirectly it is based off of Unix. However, many applications are written in Objective C, which I don't think is available for Linux.

Re:I'm definitely not knowledgeable with Mac, but.

[larry bagina]

Apple uses a modified version of gcc, but gcc has supported objective C since the NextStep days. GNUStep provides an OpenStep implementation.

Re:iPippin?

[dloose]

I love conspiracy theories as much as the next guy, but there were some very good reasons to eliminate the EV1. Check out this link: http://blogs.edmunds.com/karl/239 [edmunds.com]

Re:Graphics Cards

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I have a Quad-Core 3.0 and I can tell you, with the GPUs that came with it, I can barely play WoW, nevermind any other new games.

I'm having no troubles running WoW on my 2.16GHz MacBook Pro with only 2GB of RAM. It even works great when I use my 24" wide-screen external monitor at it's native resolution.

The only time I heard people complain about the performance of WoW, was when they didn't realize that WoW runs natively on the Mac and were running it within Parallels....

Re:iPippin?

[mutube]

I hope you (and everyone else offering suggestions on this thread) is joking. A "pippin" is a type apple [wikipedia.org], as in the fruit.

Of course, that may just be an extraordinary coincidence.

Re:Ironically

[Ravenscall]

You are wrong [ign.com]

Re:I'm definitely not knowledgeable with Mac, but.

[Sentry21]

Mac applications are written in C and/or Objective-C, using the Cocoa or Carbon libraries to provide an interface to the user (and to the underlying OS). Games specifically are usually written using OpenGL with (optionally) a mix of other platform-specific functionality. Accessing the user (via HID), the graphics card (via OpenGL, CoreGraphics, CoreAnimation, etc), and the sound hardware (via CoreAudio) is all platform-specific.

Most of a specific chunk of code written for a Windows game will (most likely) be relatively portable already (with the possible exception of non-standard types). The bits that need to be rewritten to work on OS X are the same bits that would need to be rewritten to work on Linux. Porting to OS X gains Linux almost nothing.

Re:Games?

[DECS]

Wrong: Apple didn't develop the Pippin, it was a product created by Japan's Bandai, a Mac OS licensee.

It was a packaged as a high end (well, higher priced) game console to compete against other failed attempts to provide something more than a game console and less than a computer, largely aimed at accessing the Internet.

The failure of the Pippin was no more Apple's fault than the failure of the WinCE-based Gametrac was Microsoft's fault.

In addition, the other circumstances of 1995 and 2008 are a bit different too. For example, we now have fairly common WiFi rather than only dialup, so you can download games rapidly. Apple has also changed from a weak PC ghost to a consumer electronics powerhouse with its own retail outlets.

Interestingly, Apple's iPod Touch/iPhone compare pretty well against the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP as a gaming platform:

iPhone 2.0 SDK: Video Games to Rival Nintendo DS, Sony PSP [roughlydrafted.com]
 

Re:I'm definitely not knowledgeable with Mac, but.

[DECS]

That's like saying if you build a WalMart from bricks and it doesn't work out, you can use your bricks to build a McDonalds somewhere else instead without much trouble, because you already have the bricks.
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You might be able to share some library code between platforms, but applications developed for Cocoa Touch are not going to be highly portable to Android because of a subset of commonality in of the programming languages used on both.

Android is essentially Java, except the code is converted into a non Java bytecode to run on a different VM so that Google doesn't have to pay Sun for it.

Cocoa Touch is based upon the very different Cocoa frameworks.

It will be easier to port Java code to Cocoa Touch, although the UI will still need to be built custom for the Cocoa Touch platform.

Re:They've already shown support

[SuperKendall]

According to my buddy at EA, Spore on the iPhone is dead. Basically, Apple told them they had to sell it through iTunes (and iTunes only) and wanted 1/2 the revenue. This is apparently going to be the "standard deal" for commercial apps on the iPhone. So no commercial apps, meaning no games on the iPhone.

This seems very unlikely given the stated 30% figure for any other commercial application, you figure there's no way a large company would give up more than that percentage nor would Apple try and force that out of someone like EA.

We'll see in June.

Not in the early days at least. I was in the Apple Developer Program and we weren't told shit about new OSX releases. This was back in 1999-2001.

And I was in the program a year or so ago, and am in the iPhone program now (in line waiting for a cert like many others, though I know people are are fully in). OS X developers have been getting new OS seeds for years before official releases. iPhone developers currently get access to install the beta iPhone 2.0 OS along with the development cert.

Again, this must be new. Back in the day we got a list of bugs fixed, but no descriptions of those bugs or what was actually changed. Changes to Carbon were completely undocumented. I had to track down the developers in person and beg them for info.

The iPhone SDK updates have been pretty good about documenting changed classes and attributes, and the docs are pretty good for a new API (along with a lot of very helpful sample applications).

FWIW, Sun was basically the same as Apple in terms of support.

I've also been a Java developer for a long time, and they have had beta releases of new Java versions before the official release. But in those cases it mattered less because companies are a lot slower to upgrade Java VM's than consumers are computers or other devices.

Re:Can't see it happening

[N Monkey]

Wii and PS3 do not use OpenGL.

Maybe you were being pedantic, because the PS3 apparently does use OpenGL ES [opengl.org]