What does Google’s new OS mean for games?

 Posted by (Visited 12701 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Jul 072009
 

Great question. The blog post announcing it says it’s for netbooks, really, and that the development platform “is the Web”:

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

— Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS.

Except that we’re still quite a ways from games of the Web meaning something other than Flash. The kernel is Linux, which could mean that AAA games that run on Linux (all three of them) could show up. Maybe. But I wouldn’t bank on it anytime soon.

Will Flash show up on here? Hard to imagine a Web-centric Netbook or tablet that doesn’t need it, if only for YouTube videos. So perhaps Flash will simply extend its crossplatform dominance one step further.

Who knows is this OS will gain adoption; one thing for sure, though, people will play games on it if it is possible. And the more possible it is, the more adoption it will see.

Two great Flash-related posts

 Posted by (Visited 5982 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Jul 062009
 

There’s two great posts related to Flash surfacing today:

CoderHump.com has an open letter to Adobe asking for them to make Flash the default console for the web. This is a developer-centric post, focusing on weaknesses of Flash as a generic platform for game development:

Adobe, make Flash like unto a console! Give us consistent performance! Give us excellent tools! Flex Builder is not that great, Adobe. Your compilers could be a lot better, too. Don’t worry too much about lots of fancy features. People who have to have super high end 3d and do not want to run everywhere will use tools like Torque or Unity that do 3d really well. Be everywhere, run well, be easy to develop for, and you will be loved and well rewarded.

Adobe, I have a vested interest in you succeeding. Please listen to my words. I have spent years developing game middleware on a variety of platforms. Now I am working with Flash. If Flash dominates the game industry, it will be possible for me to afford to eat.

A lot of the gems aren’t in the post, but in the comment thread that follows — worth reading.

And the inimitable Dan Cook of Lost Garden has a wonderful analysis of the business models behind Flash game development and where they are broken — and what a developer can do to fix it.

When you design your game, pick three or four revenue streams and build them into your game. Here are some categories of users that you may want keep covered.

  • People who don’t want to pay: Advertising is a good option to keep around. A few hundred bucks is still money in the bank.
  • People who are interested in more of the same: Once you’ve established the value of your game, some players want more. Give them more levels, more puzzles, more enemies in exchange for cash.
  • People who are interested in status or identity improvements: Some people see games as means of expression and identity. Give them items that let them express themselves or customize their experience.
  • People who have limited time: Some people live busy lives and want to consume your game when they desire and how they desire. Cheat codes, experience multipliers and other systems that bypass the typical progression all help satisfying this customer need.

Looks like this is just part one of a lengthier series of articles — I look forward to the next one!

Torque 3D goes for a web plugin

 Posted by (Visited 10837 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Jun 262009
 

Torque 3D looks to be challenging Unity for the 3d game in a plugin market; check out this feature on their home page:

Deploy any Torque 3D project from the World Editor to a web browser in seconds with our web publishing options. Torque 3D supports all major browsers and operating systems, including IE7, FF3, OS X and Chrome. Games perform at 100% native speed, with no performance cost, completely in your browser.

Both solutions,  of course, require that the plugins that host the native client be widely deployed, which is the biggest challenge. The gap between something like Flash or Javascript, and something like this, is measured in the hundreds of millions of installs. Of course, what you get for the native renderers in the plugins is desktop quality graphics.

The push on the other side, of course, is to upgrade the graphics in a form basically native to the browser, so you don’t need a plugin at all, or if you do it’s one you already have (because you visited YouTube once).

Flash for smartphones this fall

 Posted by (Visited 5649 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Jun 232009
 

Flash Player 10 beta coming to most smartphones this fall, says CNet. This was promised last year, (see this YouTube video showing the Flash movie playing on an Android Phone, from last November) but now there’s a date.

In a Q2 audio press release, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen confirmed that Adobe will release a beta version of Flash Player 10 in October for a number of smartphone browsers, including Windows Mobile, Google Android, Palm WebOS, and Symbian. In addition, Narayen said ARM, Nvidia, Broadcom, Intel, Texas Instruments, and Qualcomm are currently optimizing the player for their products.

No iPhone, probably because they are betting on JavaScript instead?

Google’s O3D and VW’s

 Posted by (Visited 7326 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Jun 012009
 

GigaOM has an article titled Will O3D Get Google Back Into Virtual Worlds?. Apparently, at the MetaverseU conference (which I usually attend but couldn’t this time), the tech lead for O3D said that his team’s next goal is to fully integrate it into Chrome. By the end of the year.

After his presentation, a group of developers surrounded Kokkevis, peppering him with tech-heavy questions. He told me there weren’t any companies creating MMOs in O3D yet, but he raised the possibility that Google might port Sketchup and Google Earth into O3D, “once we become part of the browser.” (Both have been implemented for MMO-related projects.)

I wrote about O3D back in April; its integration into Chrome is certainly interesting, but Chrome itself has quite a lot of adoption barriers yet. But it’s still highly intriguing tech to keep an eye on. If Sketchup and Google Earth migrate to it, that’s a pair of apps to drive adoption, for sure.

Meanwhile, the same article says Unity has reached 10m installs…

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