Android and the Iphone are a threat to Sony and Nintendo good reason why !

[joeorc]

Impulsivity said:
Notice what they say at the end there. They remain committed to providing you with the best game engine for the iphone, ipad and ipod touch.

The solution will be to rewrite the unity engine so it uses objective C and Cocoa for programing which will let it keep on making great ipod/iphone games. This will of course break the whole compatibility with Android thing (as Apple intended) thus making this a middleware that only works for apple devices.

This will leave porting to Android an extra expense and not a particularly easy process which means only a few games will make the jump and Apple will maintain a huge advantage in the mobile gaming sphere. This is only compounded by the way Apple only has a handful of devices to develop for while android phones are legion (and VASTLY different in capability) meaning the not only do you have to port to Android, but you have to port to multiple android platforms each of which may only have a few hundred thousand users at most.

When the iphone has 8 million sales in the last quarter thats just the one phone type (with different amounts of memory) while when android sells a few million its a few hundred thousand of a dozen phones on average (with some like droid more successful then others). It's just a coding nightmare.

not very likely, because there is also middleware compatability for Android phone's outside of the Iphone. go to the site the engine does not need to port from the Iphone to the Android!. you do know that Android has sold 5.4 million last quarter. and is expected to overtake the Iphone this year in quartly sales.If anything Android is not just going into phones TV's and Netbook's are also Prime for Android.

 

example:

n0mad: who's develop's with the unity engine

This post could be a bit uninteresting for current Unity users, but I just realized something that could even strenghten the multiplatform objective :

- Making a game for the appstore without Unity turns it iPhone OS only, and therefore sticks the game to this platform. So for studios that are investing years into gamemaking, this is a no-no, as iPhone OS won't be the trend forever. Plus if the game actually fails to reach its audience, it can be put to trashcan.

- Making a game with Unity now let anybody create a long term project, without caring about any hardware becoming obsolete. Yep, upgrading a game for another platform won't need to rewrite all the code and all the assets. Plus if the audience is not reached on the appstore, with upcoming platforms, it will cost only one button to try again, costless, on another OS.

Now back on the long term project thing, let me bring an example :

I started a game in January 09. Right there, it was clearly designed for iPhone 3G : 2D backgrounds, not so many animations, limited content ... hard to limit a rush of game ideas, but necessary.

Then came the 3GS, which made me want to enhance the whole thing. 3G retro-compatibility would be made by switching things off.

Now in an advanced development state, I'm realizing that the project wouldn't need more than 20% of additional work to be presentable on big consoles Indie store. Why should I not take advantage of this export feature after all ?
And more : I'm not concerned now, but for really advanced projects, it is even possible to re-use the casual version, and turn it to a prototype for a game studio to convert it into some fully branded console title. And that's huge.

If I had developped in Xcode, all these extended platform & business ideas would never had been possible. I just would be stuck to iPhone hardware and appstore, with a possibility for my game never to be seen by anyone thanks to overcrowding.


In short, Unity somehow saved me from a very possible 50000$ bankruptcy (time spent, softwares, hardware, etc), and even gave me the possibility to turn this project into whatever format I want, from a simple casual game to a full prototype for an edited console title.

This engine flexibility should be supposed to attract a lot of game studios by now, considering how risky is the game business.

(I don't see any reference to this extended project lifetime in Features part of the site, so I thought it would be worth to point at.)



Finally, why in the hell Unity would be saving the world of casual games ?
Because when I look at some devs that are cloning 300 times the same app (basically just changing the colors), I feel that if they aimed at several platforms, they wouldn't need to spam with 300 apps. 3 would be sufficient to do the same benefits, I'm sure.

And as I saw myself, if an engine give the ability to export to a better hardware, the need to reach it quickly shows itself, which means better graphic designs from the start, even for casual games.
Proof is that when you look at the Showcase forums here, it's crowded with awesome graphics, far better matching with actual console quality than most appstore games (and even Flash web games).

In the end, with its AAA features and multiple platforms, Unity is "drawing the bottom to the top".


So please Unity staff, don't stop spreading the platforms

though that would indeed be a big problem if said company had not already done that anyway:

Using Objective-C means that you will be stuck in Apple-land until you decide that you are wiling to rewrite your code, line-by-line in Java for Android, in C# for Windows7 and in C++ for Symbian/Blackberry.

unless they have already done just that!

an besides you could alway's even with the new agreement in place:

 Write the core of your app in C/C++ then wrap that with ObjC and Cocoa touch

now if you do it properly

you than would  have well structured code that can migrate to multiple platforms and doesn't lock you into a particular environment like Flash anyway.