John Carmack Not Enthused About Android Marketplace 163
An anonymous reader writes "During an in-depth and informative interview, Doom creator and id Software co-founder John Carmack opines on iOS game development, the economics of mobile development vs. console development, why mobile games lend themselves to more risk-taking and greater creativity, and finally, why he's not too keen on the Android Marketplace as a money-making machine. '...I'm honestly still a little scared of the support burden and the effort that it's going to take for our products, which are very graphics-intensive.'"
Re:Rage for Android? (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is why Value ate their lunch. As I said in another post: Valve/Bioware/Blizzard see opportunity while Carmack worries about it being hard or boring work.
Hardware incompatibility beyond Google's control (Score:5, Insightful)
iOS has two advantages. A single native binary can target all iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices. There is a single digital distribution channel, the App Store.
With Android handset/tablet manufacturers are free to use different CPUs, GPU, etc. They may also be using different versions of Android. Different versions of the game may be necessary for the different permutations. This complicates the coding and testing. Having to deal with manufacturer specific stores might add to the overhead. These sort of problems are the "cost" of having an open platform like Android and there is not really anything Google can do about it.
Re:Rage for Android? (Score:5, Insightful)
It costs money, it costs time, it costs support post-launch. Unable? No. Unwilling? If the return on investment (both monetary and effort) isn't there, then yes.
Remember that before Quake Live, Id games' online support basically consisted of a master server that just gave you a list of servers, and an FTP server with patches that relied on popular mirror sites to prevent it from going down due to demand (which it sometimes still did when new patches were released). They didn't even host their own servers, much less their own online distribution platform for the assets of the entire game. And Quake Live is basically an 11 year old game at this point. The size of the assets, method of distribution, and demand for the game are all going to be different (smaller) from a brand new AAA title like Rage is intended to be.
If Apple does the hosting for you, but Android does not (for files over 30 MB), that's a huge difference.
Re:Hardware incompatibility beyond Google's contro (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the Computer vs Console battle all over again. In the end, someone came out with an API for games (Direct3d), and therefore the problem was minimized quite a lot. As handheld devices become more powerful, someone will introduce an API that makes game programming much easier for Android devices.
Re:Rage for Android? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Hardware incompatibility beyond Google's contro (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do you assume Google cares? You are not their customer (unlike Apple). The carrier is Google's customer. You are just eyeballs for advertising.
Google wins when every crappy phone has Android on it, regardless of the end user's experience. They don't need quality, they need quantity. Being able to use different GPUs and CPUs is critical because that is why you can find Android phones for 1/4 the cost of the high end smart phones.
Re:Rage for Android? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes but that is the problem with Android. I have a one year old Android phone. When I picked it because at the time it was the fastest CPU, had an OLED screen, and used stock Android.
Now it can not play Angry birds and is not getting 2.2 much less 2.3! This is not a super old phone but the Samsung Moment is is a dead end device.
It was the best phone I could get at the time. So if you were to write a game for Android what do you target as the lowend? The Droid? The Epic? The Nexus S?
I like Android but Google needs to "lock down" the manufactures a bit more IMHO. Right now I would buy a Nexus S if Google offered it on Sprint. I am tired of dinking about with vendors skinning Android and with Vendors and Carriers not updating the OS.
What I would like to see is for Google to certify some phones as Google Prime or some such thing. They would have stock Android and would get updates right from Google. Sort of a Nexus but one that any manufacture can make and any carrier can carry.