I don't know why you'd say that Nintendo is afraid of iOS. Or rather, the reasons for them being afraid of mobile platforms is a little different than you are implying. During Iwata's keynote at GDC, he spent a while talking about these platforms and how they are saturating the market with low-quality games that are bogging down the industry as a whole and lessening the value of big budget, well-produced games made by your more traditional gaming companies. He's afraid that the value of content will decrease as the amount of content available increases, which is certainly a valid concern.
If you meant that Nintendo should be afraid of the massive success of iOS, then yeah, I kind of agree. Still, making a sequel to a monumentally successful mobile game on the most successful gaming console at the moment (or its 3D successor, due to launch soon) would hardly be a bad idea. Yeah, lots of "non-gamers" love Angry Birds, but that's the same market that Nintendo had been going after with the DS in the first place (remember Brain Training?).
Yeah, I loved this article especially because of the "mythbusting" it does. We've been working on designing our sign-up page for a while, and a whole lot of the conventional wisdom doesn't seem to take into account actual user behavior.
The logged-out homepage that we have put together should provide potential users with enough information to sell them on the quality of our content and usefulness of our product before they even get to the sign-up page.
Nevertheless, it's always great to get more insight on this all-important element of design.
Seeing as I have an inability to get more than five or six hours of uninterrupted sleep a night, polyphasic sleep has always appealed to me. My life is a constant struggle against sleep deprivation and running a startup for the past year hasn't helped matters one bit.
Still, it's rather hard to see a way for a sleep schedule like this to be viable for most people unless it becomes the dominant way that people find their rest (which is hardly likely).
Yeah, looks pretty, I suppose. As good as it looks, though, it's still not photo-realistic by any stretch, and still falls prey to the uncanny valley much the same way most games have this past generation. All games look good these days. That's pretty much a given. If you have the budget to invest the resources into crafted a detailed world like the one presented in the demo, it's gonna look good.
So why exactly is everyone so excited about this demo? I can tell you that it's not because of the technical merits, like DX11 tessellation or support for Nvidia’s Physx, Apex and 3D Vision. Instead, it's likely the moody lighting, cinematic camera angles, and detailed textures that caught peoples' eyes, none of which say anything about games made using this engine.
Maybe I'm just a bit of a curmudgeon, but this video hardly seems like a revolution in any way. Rather, it's just more of the same of what we've seen out of Epic for the past five or six years.
Sounds eerily similar to the Epic Win app, just focused on fitness rather than generic self-improvement.
Nevertheless, I think that "gameifying" more aspects of people's lives will directly result in an increase in the quality of those lives. Games provide people with a near-instantaneous sense of achievement that they may not be able to find in the "real world." Carrying these feelings of accomplishment over to even the most mundane elements of individuals' lives should help to make people fitter, happier, and more productive (heh).
Wow. If Facebook can manage to get HD content up for that low of a price, this may be a huge coup for them. At three dollars for a two-day rental, this service would already be half the price of what Microsoft charges for similar rental content on the Xbox 360 (at only 720p, no less).
I do have a point of contention with the article though as the author seems to think that most college students aren't crafty enough to connect their laptops to their televisions to watch the streaming HD content there. Preposterous!
I run a site (gamexplain.com) and have had a fair amount of problems getting our SEO up to snuff. We've followed a whole lot of the fundamentals espoused by people like the author of this article, but we still struggle with the incoming links, and that has hurt us somewhat. We don't really want to spam our articles to every aggregator and blogger under the sun, though maybe that's what we should have been spending our time on rather than trying to write informative articles that stray from the norm of what you might see from other gaming sites.
Quite honestly, the best way for us to get incoming links in this industry, is to write articles that I would not consider "quality content," but rather inflammatory, misguided, or just plain offensive. In the past, articles that fell into these categories have even garnered us attention in the academic community, so take that as you will.
I've long been a supporter of the idea that gameplay comes before graphics. Though it's certainly neat to see a demo looking so dazzling, it really doesn't say all that much to me about the future of the games industry. It's long been clear that over time games will continue to look progressively better.
This reason is why I was actually so happy to see Nintendo abandon this pursuit of ever-prettier graphics in the hopes that gamers would be drawn in by the innovative gameplay ideas that propelled the Wii to the top of the console heap this generation. Though the Wii has somewhat fallen short on my expectations, I am still impressed by Nintendo's decision.
This generation has been the death knell for countless (up-til-now) successful companies. The higher development costs of making prettier and prettier games has meant that a single flop can tank the company. It's exactly because of this that I believe we are seeing the rise of mobile and social games as they are cheap not only for the consumer to pick up, but also for the developer to produce in the first place.
I don't know if there is one single takeaway from this info. It seems like the dearth of competitive games on both platforms at this point when compared to the iOS must at least be partly responsible for the higher returns.
If you meant that Nintendo should be afraid of the massive success of iOS, then yeah, I kind of agree. Still, making a sequel to a monumentally successful mobile game on the most successful gaming console at the moment (or its 3D successor, due to launch soon) would hardly be a bad idea. Yeah, lots of "non-gamers" love Angry Birds, but that's the same market that Nintendo had been going after with the DS in the first place (remember Brain Training?).