Why is Sony attracting iOS ports?

Shifty Geezer

Shifty Geezer

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This may be a misperception by me, but a fair few games I see as PSN exclusives for the consoles are also iOS titles. The latest I just read was this a precious Sensible Software veteran about bringing a Speedball 2 clone to iOS, Minis, Bada and Android. Why would all these download platforms be considered but not Wiiware and Live! Arcade? Same for other titles like Dungeon Hunter Alliance. Is Sony offering good financial incentives, or is there now a very easy framework for smaller games elliminating much of the graft of development? Even then, surely XNA offers everything needed for straight forward game development. Maybe in this particular case it's Minis, which has a potential market of 50 million PSPs and 40 million PS3s, so a tiny take-up can still be worthwhile.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
This may be a misperception by me, but a fair few games I see as PSN exclusives for the consoles are also iOS titles. The latest I just read was this a precious Sensible Software veteran about bringing a Speedball 2 clone to iOS, Minis, Bada and Android. Why would all these download platforms be considered but not Wiiware and Live! Arcade? Same for other titles like Dungeon Hunter Alliance. Is Sony offering good financial incentives, or is there now a very easy framework for smaller games elliminating much of the graft of development? Even then, surely XNA offers everything needed for straight forward game development. Maybe in this particular case it's Minis, which has a potential market of 50 million PSPs and 40 million PS3s, so a tiny take-up can still be worthwhile.
Click to expand...

Speedball II is on Arcade. Not a good port though.

Cheers
 
It could be due to programming language support? Do the PS3 and iOS have anything in common there? You'll have to tell me as I completely do NOT know.
 
Silent_Buddha said:
Perhaps through shared use of OGL ES? Does X360 support OGL ES levels or is it Direct3D only?

Regards,
SB
Click to expand...

Only Direct3D (native or managed XNA).

The OpenGL ES on the PS3 is somewhat special it’s 1.1 with a custom extension for shaders written in
Cg (similar to Microsoft’s HLSL) not GLSL. Beside of this it sucks from the performances point of view.

But porting some code from one 3D lib to another is in general not a big thing.
 
Isn't it just easier to get a game on PSN? On Live you have to go through a publisher, or agree to let MS act as the publisher (if they like it enough), in which case it becomes exclusive and your terms may not be favorable. PSN allows you to self publish, essentially, without getting stuck in ghetto like the Indie Arcade on Xbox.
 
My understanding is Xbox live is something of a pain to publish on currently.
which is probably why things are going to PSN.
Given the complexity of most of these games porting to a different graphics API is probably a few days work + test time.
 
So PSN doesn't require a publisher? I know Sony made some plan a while back to better support Indy devs, is not requiring a publisher a part of this plan?

I thought PSN and XBLA were pretty much the same outside of PSN having certification per region and XBLA having one single cert that applied to all regions, no?
 
I'm not sure what the current XBLA requirements are, a friend of mine runs a company that publishes on both, and he was moaning about the current XBLA setup.
The XBLA requirements have changed over the lifetime of the platform, I have no idea what the current requirements are, just anecdotal moaning.
 
I think you're confusing XBLA with XBLIG. It has stricter requirements than XBLA(readable on 13" CRT).

Tommy McClain
 
Shifty Geezer said:
This may be a misperception by me, but a fair few games I see as PSN exclusives for the consoles are also iOS titles. The latest I just read was this a precious Sensible Software veteran about bringing a Speedball 2 clone to iOS, Minis, Bada and Android. Why would all these download platforms be considered but not Wiiware and Live! Arcade? Same for other titles like Dungeon Hunter Alliance. Is Sony offering good financial incentives, or is there now a very easy framework for smaller games elliminating much of the graft of development? Even then, surely XNA offers everything needed for straight forward game development. Maybe in this particular case it's Minis, which has a potential market of 50 million PSPs and 40 million PS3s, so a tiny take-up can still be worthwhile.
Click to expand...

http://www.ddgameworld.com/2010/11/sony-snap-will-it-help-bring-apple-apps-to-sony-devices/
SONY SNAP, WILL IT HELP BRING APPLE APPS TO SONY DEVICES?

So, Sony is basing its next generation CE development platform on the same format that gave rise to OSX and iOS. As it is unlikely that they can licence directly from Apple, this is the next best thing when it comes to developing consumer apps. It will be interesting to see if this is enough to attract the developers of hundreds of thousands of apps to begin porting apps for SONY CE (Consumer Electronics).

The greatest challenge will be creating the same type of community environment enjoyed by Apple app developers. The Cocos2D Community is one such example of a support infrastructure that has allowed start up developers to make best selling games for the Apple AppStore.
Click to expand...

Just confirms many of the comments in the thread.
 
patsu said:
Interesting... I saw SNAP but quickly forgot about it.

I wonder how important it is to Playstation Network. News about iOS and Android device support are starting to surface more frequently.

EDIT: Ha ha, not so important. Project suspended based on jeff rigsby's post here:
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1511333&postcount=398

Looks like they're going after Android support instead.
Click to expand...

Quite possible. The on-hold SNAP program probably is related to Sony determining how they are going to proceed. My fear is that they are reacting to the jailbreak and are pulling the plug on third party applications and open source tools. In my opinion that would be exactly the wrong thing to do.

So how do you put more native language support in Android and not have it incompatible with the main fork. Provide a tool that precompiles Android apps to native language?
 
Just read a Eurogamer article based on this article from 2D Boy, developers of World of Goo, on the health of XBLA and where indie games are going. I've only read EG's summary and the full article has all the stats, so it's worth checking itself. Basically he's suggesting XBLA (MS) is too difficult to work with and indies are targeting other, more open platform, hence more devs moving over to PSN and away from XBLA. And excerpt from the lengthy article:
Why Is This Happening?

I asked these developers to rate the importance of certain factors in choosing which platforms they will develop games for. The most influential factor was ease of working with the platform owner, with 69% of developers rating it Very Important. In 2nd and 3rd place were the platform’s install base (63%) and how well the platform’s controls match the game (58%).
Since ease of working with the platform owner was voted the most important factor in choosing a platform, I sent out a followup survey to ask how easy each platform owner has been to work with. Here are the results:
difficulty.png
Click to expand...
 
Microsoft also reserves the right to refuse publishers to release a game on XBLA if they don't get served first, so maybe that is why it's more likely to port a iOS game to PSN, rather than XBLA. Since they've allready released on iOS, MS might refuse to put up the game.
 
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