This is an interesting way of trying to squeeze more apps and circumvent some of the latests storage-related issues in iOS
[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/tvos/document...
But it can be challenging for HD 3D games, something like Tell Tale games or Infinity Blade...
Simple 2D games will probably be just fine with a 200mb limit but pretty much any high tier game is going to have size issues, I think. Hopefully streaming assets down will work out for those games, but there are significant numbers of games for which network streaming is impossible (open-world games, for example, Really Need all their assets on local storage at all times.)
On my Android phone as well I have multiple games up above the 500mb mark, 2d and 3d alike.
Feels like a disconnect between the docs and reality.
PS: Transistor is fantastic - that music!
iOS9 adds the on demand resources feature that does exactly that.
According to https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta... you can have 2GB of resources in use at once, for a total of 20GB overall.
That might be what Apple think, but that certainly isn't what users think. People won't wait 30 seconds for a game to start - they'll just delete the game and buy a different one. If too many games have long load times they'll stop using Apple TV for games altogether. By pitching Apple TV as 'apps in the living room' the competition stops being Netflix and starts being a Playstation.
So if the developers do the right job, then that first 200 MB download contains everything for the player to start playing. Then, before those initial assets "run out", the additional stuff will already have been loaded in the background.
Yes. This is going to be difficult for developers, but it's also a valuable skill to be gained because it helps developers to keep their assets organized and their code will be better at dealing with streaming resources, which, in turn will open the doors for many interesting things to do in the future.
We'll see what happens - after all, when you consider a disk size of 32 or 64 GB, then obviously the current limit is purely artificial.
If developers are unable to adapt to the restrictions or if the framework isn't good enough to the point where the end-user experience suffers, then we'll either see the restrictions lifted or the framework improved.
These restrictions don't restrict the type of game you can make, they only make it harder compared to a unlimited initial distribution.
(note however that if the initial download must fit in 200 MB, then the customer experience potentially improves as the time to download 200 MB is naturally much shorter than the time required to download 20GB which is the maximum size an app can currently have).
That way the OS can clear out unnecessary files and they just get downloaded again the next time you play the game. I imagine there is room for temporary video caches etc.