Carmack says Apple is not proud of the iPhone being a game machine | Hacker News Reader

Carmack says Apple is not proud of the iPhone being a game machine

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66 pointscesare41 comments

Imagine all the satellite engineers, dismayed that people use GPS to geocache junk in tupperware around the world.

Imagine all the thousands of man-millenia of research in CCDs and computer networking and systems engineering and UI design just so that some people can upload cat videos from their phone onto Youtube.

There's no reason not to celebrate when something gives others joy, even when it's not Serious Business.

In the words of William Gibson: "The Street always finds its own uses for technology."

Only in his vision, those uses were mostly dark and gritty. In real 21st century, we find a lot of those uses cutesy and banal.

It's too bad he didn't supply a bit of context with his opinion. Apple has spent a considerable amount of time in public events over the last 2 years promoting the iPhone as a gaming platform. The run run ads on TV spotlighting iPhone games. They buy ads on gaming sites. The iPhone as a gaming device doesn't limit it's functionality in other ways so there would be no rationale reason to blame gaming as holding back the platform's potential as this article suggests.

Yes this does strike me as being odd. I have source code for a video game demo that Apple made and provided to developers if you asked them nicely for it. There were two sessions out of a 5 session long day (I believe) dedicated specifically to OpenGL and other game related technologies.

One thing Apple has been very good at with marketing the iPhone is specifically not pigeon holing it as a device best used for a specific task. Their whole campaign right now centres around the premise that the iPhone does just about anything. Contrast that with the Blackberry which people pigeon hole as the device for business people and folks that like a keyboard.

Perhaps Apple isn't promoting the iPhone as a gaming platform to the fullest extent that it can. But this may very well be by design and should not be confused as Apple being ashamed of it as a gaming machine. Apple just wants the iPhone to have the universal applicability of the PC and corner other smartphones like the Blackberry, into being to its PC what electronic typewriters were.

Yes, this really surprised me, especially after hearing Schiller get on stage and just gush about how unexpectedly successful the iPhone / iPod Touch platform has been for gaming.

This reminds me of the Vimeo move to disallow gaming videos. They wanted Vimeo to be for "creative expression", and straight said they didn't think game-related videos met that test. Original 2008 blog post here: http://www.vimeo.com/blog:140

I think some of the iPhone's gaming success is the market--players demanding more games--but some of it is also the lure of game development itself. If the whole point of the App Store was to let developers make whatever they wanted, and they want to make games...isn't that kind of the point?

(And yes, it is pretty naive to assume all iPhone games were made for the love of it instead of trying to cash in on a gold rush).

so what do they want it to be, if not a gaming machine?

from their ads and the dev conferences, it seems like they actually do want it to be a gaming platform.

I suspect they're savvy enough to understand that just 'cause Steve doesn't want it to be a gaming machine doesn't mean that he can't make a ton of money by having games on it.

Right, the powerful graphics technology and the multi-touch ability makes it ideal for interesting games. It only makes sense to play up the gaming aspects.

But I can understand how Apple might be interested in getting more powerful "real" applications on the iPhone. I heard the Android ad on the radio for the first time yesterday and was slightly fascinated by the way Google is advertising the Android as a "powerful" robot tool that gets things done.

In contrast the iPhone feels more like a fun tool for geeks, perhaps not so much a business oriented device as an entertainment device.

Well, Mac in general aren't marketed as being business-oriented (unless you're a design firm maybe). Why would Apple change things drastically for the iPhone?

The are very much marketed as devices to enable a lifestyle, tho'. This is the same market that consumer BlackBerry competes in too.

One of the advantages that startups have over big companies, is that they know that they're searching for what the market wants. Once you're successful, you can lose sight of that. ON the other hand, PG says again and again, that you may well end up with something different than your original idea.

"All in one device?" Heck yes, that's going to include games! My iPhone has as high a fun quotient as my Nintendo DS, and it's smaller and much more convenient for me to put media on.

Even the business types at Apple know they don't want to compete with the PSP on the PSP's terms. Esp. since you can add a camera, GPS, Skype headset, etc to the PSP now.

I don't think they have too much to worry about from Sony. The last PSP had a cassette loading mechanism for god sake. Nintendo is the one.

The newest one is all downloaded, the main problem is that the downloaded games cost the same as brand-new store bought ones - meaning you can't get cheapo 2nd hand games, and downloading games doesn't save you any money despite not having to carry around the cartridge.

To be honest most non-casual games on the iPhone suck. And I rarely spend any time playing games on the iPhone. It just wasn't designed to be a gaming device. As great as the touch screen is, controls usually end up sucking. There's no way most people would ever see it as a gaming device. It may play games better than other phones, but it's other features still outweigh it in its definition.

>There's no way most people would ever see it as a gaming device.

I think that hardcore gamers will probably never see it as a gaming device, but for most people, the iPhone is fantastic. It's something they already carry around, and has bucket loads of quick, simple arcadey games to play to kill some time on the train. The iPhone probably logs more hours of gaming than any other portable device out there.

Yea but what I'm saying is that it does probably log more game hours, but only because it's much better at gaming just as it's much better at being a phone, a web browser, etc, than other phones.

I was with you up until the last sentence. I think the Nintendo DS probably has a billion percent more.

Yeah, sorry, definitely underestimated the number of DSs out there.

Nintendo DS: 113 million

iPhone: 21 million

There's heaps of other gaming devices too. The iphone is tiny compared to the number of mobile phones - with games like snake :)

For example 110 million s40 phones sold in 2008 only.

Many people have the apple reality distortion field activated... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field

"""when the device is truly capable of so much more"""

Like what?

(some) Games are some of the most demanding things computers do.

Besides, I'd be more inclined to go with that if they hadn't hobbled the dock connector, bluetooth and SDK to severely limit what it can do for the first two years or more.

I wonder what kind of kit one would need to turn a 32GB iPhone into some large fraction of an OQO? What would that do to netbooks? What would it do to laptops and Macbooks? And should Apple care?

How about something with about the same form factor as the Macbook Air, but convertible to a Tablet, which is really just a sort of "Thin client" accessory to the iPhone or some smartphone? Price it low enough so that it plus an iPhone will add up to mid-tier laptop in price. (Read: cheaper than the cheapest Macbook. Parity with Mac Mini?)

I suspect that a lot of people would just get one of those instead of a laptop.

I'm amazed at how far technology has advanced..even since I was a kid (I'm 28). I just got an HTC snap and I loaded it up with a bunch of old game system emulators. I can now play NES, SNES, Neo Geo, and any other game system that I played as a kid...right from my phone.

> SNES

Really? I would think that this would be controller limited. Any game that made full use of all the controller buttons might be difficult, especially on a touch-screen.

I don't like this kind of journalism. He cites something like "Apple is not proud..." in two lines and we have three paragraphs from other person interpretation, telling whatever he wants. Just give me the entire conversation and don't get out of context.

Classic trick for manipulating information.

When Carmack says Apple is not proud on the iPhone I believe is about Steve Jobs when he thinks that computers are powerful machines and you can use it for doing amazing creative and scientific work but you can use it for wasting all your time too.

I'm trying to remember the exact real interview he said that, I think it was in the famous Playboy magazine interview, long long time ago.

They get a ton of money from that, but feel more proud of other things.

They're marketing the iPod touch primarily as a game machine, I don't think Carmack is right — maybe they're just not as extraordinarily enthused about gaming as Carmack is.

But they do nothing but market the iPod Touch, which is nothing more than a crippled iPhone, as a hand-held gaming device. Big ol' Whiskey Tango Foxtrot on that one.

They may not be happy about it, but come on, the Apple of today isn't stupid.

There's MONEY in them thar gamin' hills.

Well, they aren't stupid for this reason. I'm just saying that it doesn't compute that "Apple hates gaming". They are pushing gaming rather much harder than any other smartphone platform right now.

Just like Facebook doesn't like the platform ben used for games. That's the beauty of a market economy though - the consumer always wins.

It's interesting that you chose that phrase since both Facebook and the iPhone are tightly controlled "markets".

Well, no matter how controlled the internal market for Facebook and the iPhone are, they compete in external markets as well and in order to stay relevant, they have to allow games. Ergo, consumers win.

Jobs has never understood the value of the gaming market w/r to building a computing platform. Something that pretty much everybody does one a computing platform as soon as they have a spot of free time. Hell, people were figuring out gaming on cathode ray tubes in the late 40's.

To be fair, I think he's desperately trying to not turn Apple into Commodore.

Well, the entire App Store release model seems to be designed explicitly for games and media content, and actually seems to be fairly decent in that regard (certainly better than any predecessors). As for Applications, especially those that interface with the Internet, it's fucking abysmal.

"It could be so much more"

Really? It's a 3" screen without a keyboard. It's good for web browsing and pinball. I am not sure what anyone else would want it for; netbooks are much better for anything that involves more than 10 minutes of concentration.

Touch & motion input works really well for some types of games. More traditional games have adopted on-screen buttons with mixed success. There's a pretty wide variety of games out there for the iPhone that seem to be very popular.

Meteor Blitz does an awesome job with its controls. (Emulating two analog sticks in the lower corners.) It's like a cross between Asteroids and Robotoron. Once refinement like that, plus a little design savvy, make it out into the programming community in the form of libraries, you'll have a more consistent level of quality.

Design savvy: minimalist. Get as much as you can out of just one or two control elements, plus a few accessories.

That goes for the Mac too. I've got several friends who'd have switched to the Mac long ago, if it wasn't for the fact that they were enthousiastic PC gamers.

These people are power users. Convert them, and their friends and family will follow.

This is one of the reasons I went Mac when they switched to Intel. I knew I could have a Mac laptop and also gaming laptop (via BootCamp) in one machine.

Are you implying that Bootcamp is Apple's gaming strategy on the Mac?

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