iPad and noise.io

[Peter Korsten]

Op 29-1-2010 1:33, Andrew Tarpinian schreef:

> Past that time on the PC but not on the relatively new iPhone OS and
> app store distribution. It basically singlehandedly exploded the
> mobile gaming market, and a lot of developers paving the way in this
> market are simply individuals and small groups. These people with
> success have and will expand their companies and/or get picked up by
> the bigger distributers but the fact remains, the opportunity is there.

See, I don't share that enthusiasm. What we saw - not only on the 
iPhone, but on all mobile phones when they started to acquire games - is 
that people were happy playing games that had all the sophistication 
that we were used to in the mid 1980s.

The games I've seen demoed on the iPhone/iPod/iPad are all of such 
complexity that you need more than a small team to build them, let alone 
an individual.

It strikes me very much as the open source movement and the 'bazaar' 
model of developing: despite a good 15 years of Linux development, the 
last 10 of those with big players like IBM pushing it, no open source 
application has managed to make a significant dent in proprietary 
software. Maybe Firefox, but even so, it remains fairly low when 
compared to Internet Explorer. Lots of prophesying, but nothing to show 
for it.

(Before people start calling 'and what about Apache HTTPd?': that was 
already there before IIS, or other proprietary applications.)

And whilst we hear about success stories, like the guy who developed a 
helicopter game and got rich from it, how many untold stories are there 
of all those developers who don't make any money?

I've been involved in software development for too long to believe that 
it's something you can still do on your own.

- Peter