Last December Apple had sold over 55 million iPads , 15.4 million just in the last quarter.Comparatively, consoles like PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 households have been 62 and 65 million units respectively, but while these have been on the market since late 2005 and 2006, the bite of the apple tablet has not completed its second year of life. How can we be surprised that the biggest names in the gaming industry are looking the new iPad with greedy eyes ?
Apple is definitely developing their devices as if he cared much triple-A games. It’s easy to imagine a world where the iPhone is more powerful than a console, which communicates wirelessly with your TV and your command and it becomes your new console.
Mike Capps, president of Epic Games (Gears of War Infinity Blade), it is clear. The iPad aims to get the attention of development studies to be tipping in securities triple-A, those with million dollar budgets and better graphics. The new iPad already has more resolution and twice the memory than the current generation consoles, but its GPU is still far behind (256 GFLOPS PS3 Cell processor compared to 32GFLOPS of A5X).
Casual or hardcore?
There are many who believe that for the iPad can overcome the boundaries of casual games is essential to give back to the multi-touch interface and the use of accelerometers and gyroscope using a traditional Bluetooth control , and although for most titles is a valid thought, Nintendo DS games like The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks show that there is room for this type of mechanical controls beyond Angry Birds.
Frank Gibeau, president of Electronic Arts (Battlefield 3, Star Wars: The Old Republic), said his company has set eyes on Apple closely following their movements.
When the iPhone gets a processing power equivalent to that of an Xbox 360 and connect to the TV will be no problem for us. We will play through the iPad and show on television. (…) It used to be, oh well, the show is only for Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, but that is no longer the case.
Crytek (Far Cry, Crysis) is working on its first title for iPhone, Fibble , but while this is a puzzle game (which uses the CryEngine 3, though), the company already warns that “as more people come to these platforms, they will follow their fans “ .
Constant evolution
The consoles are not going away just as titles continue to appear for first-order PC despite the success of these. Sony lives his sweetest moment as the PlayStation 3 and Microsoft refers to Apple managed to snatch the record for the consumer electronics product that was sold faster by placing eight million Kinect for Xbox 360 on the street in just 60 days … but later it has been speculated that Apple regained selling 29 million units of iPhone 4S in 78 days.
However, it is hard to ignore the data suggest that Apple will become, if not already done so , in the fourth power in the gaming industry with as much or more weight than others.
Tomorrow is now selling the third generation of iPhone with a GPU virtually identical to that of the recent PlayStation Vita just two years after its first release and developer support is total. Firemint is already working on an improved version of Real Racing 2 Electronic Arts and update some of its major titles likeDead Space or Mass Effect: Infiltrator to support the new resolution of 2048 × 1536 pixels.
Epic Games is ready to take the next step with Infinity Blade: Dungeons , a much more ambitious than the two previous installments of the saga which is set in both graphical and gameplay, and its president is particularly excited about the potential of the new iPad.
“The [graphics processor] quad core makes a big difference in terms of what we can do.When you think about it, have quadrupled the screen resolution and have doubled the graphics performance, so we could not think, ‘Great, we’ll have plenty of additional graphics performance. ” But they have also increased the memory and that makes a big difference.One: we all share memory with other apps that are running. And two: it will allow us to use higher resolution textures, which are much harder to draw. No need for that processor.However, take up a lot of space. Infinity Blade 2 occupies about 700 megs or so, is a big game. And now, to draw something with four times the resolution, you need even more. Having more memory has been a real triumph for us. “
There is no question of moving a game to the native resolution Retina display will challenge developers, but we must not forget that not even the PS3 and Xbox 360 usually work at its maximum resolution, devoting his raw power to increase the number of polygons and shaders (in short, the transformations and special effects lighting, fire or fog) made ??the calculations more manageable resolution reescalarla then displayed. Those who do that will benefit from an easier way for the new resolution will be the 2D game developers as Halfbrick (Fruit Ninja, Jetpack Joyride).
“We are extremely excited about this huge decision. Will mean a lot of hard work to improve our games but we always move forward and raise our level of quality … Apple itself says that with a little dedication developers can do amazing things. That’s definitely what we want to achieve, so the team in Australia will get to work … as soon as you wake up! “
We are wide awake and we can not wait to see what lies ahead . What about you?
Via: The Verge
