Helgason: Jobs doesn?t understand development economics

David Helgason, Unity Technologies CEO, has said that he believes Apple CEO Steve Jobs “doesn’t understand the economics of games development.”

The comments were made at the annual Develop Conference in Brighton, where Helgason was hosting a session titled ‘Gameification: How Games are Everywhere’.

Helgason was answering an audience question about his opinion of Jobs’ recent negative comments on iPhone games built with middleware.

“I think he also said that consumers will decide what they think of them, and they have decided that some of the middleware games – including some of the Unity games – are pretty good,” he said.

“He doesn’t understand the economics of game development fundamentally. It’s reasonable to use a native UI framework for an information driven application like Facebook or Linkedin, but nobody actually seriously does that with games, especially not games for iPhone or something like that.”