March 4th, 2010 @ Sway Bar, London
UK studios converge to battle over who's the cleverest - have you booked your place yet?
Thursday April 22nd, 2009 @ The Brewery, London
The countdown to the MCV Awards 2010 has begun – with date, venue and categories announced.
July 14th, 2010 @ The Hilton Metropole, Brighton
The Develop Industry Excellence Awards is the only event which rewards the work done by Europe’s leading games development companies.
Fishlabs CEO excited by the iPhone’s OpenGL 2.0 support, cautious on financial viability
Apple’s new iPhone 3G S has the potential to outdo Sony’s PSP in terms of graphical capabilities.
That was the assessment of Michael Schade, CEO of the Germany-headquartered mobile phone developer Fishlabs.
Speaking to Pocketgamer, Schade reasons that the new iPhone’s OpenGL 2.0 support can allow developers to craft games which will “push the iPhone beyond PSP," though he does warn that such opportunities will be resisted by financial barriers.
"As graphic assets need to be designed from scratch to benefit from 2.0 shaders, it will be very hard to monetize the extra effort in the early days," he said. "It's definitely not worth it for $0.99 apps."
Schade was not however unconcerned that developers will have more iPhone systems to optimise for. He said the catalogue of iPhones and iPod Touches will create “some fragmentation”, but he says Fishlabs can still support all devices, using “just one SKU that detects automatically what device it's running on, and switches to the best graphics automatically."
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Too bad that, without a D-Pad and real tactile buttons, the iPhone is pretty much doomed to failure as an all-out gaming device. Unless all you ever want to play with is a touchscreen, which would suffice for several casual gamer genres and minigames - but nothing much else.
The new iphone support OpenGL ES 2.0 (not OpenGL 2.0: it is important to make the difference, espcially regarding performances).
The current iphone was launched more than a year after the PSP and is not more powerful on the GPU side.
This new phone will be launched a long time after the PSP and, pretending to be a gaming machine, you would expect better performance for sure!
We don't know the specs for sure, but they say il will to be compatible OpenGL ES 2.0, so, my guess is that they would use a PowerVR SGX this time and it all down to the configuration they are using. It goes from performance lower than PSP (series 5/5XT) to a bit better (series 5) or much (series 5XT only)... in theory!
It's really hard to tell at the moment what will be better and... does it really matter?
PSP games are real games, while on the iphone, it's still mobile phone like games for each cheap price.
For real games, they'll need to convince publishers to put big bucks on big games, so, they'll need to establish a clear "full price" (> $20) categorie, clearly identified by consumers.
I am looking forward to that.
