The fall of Nintendo

“Nintendo, out of all these game companies?” you might wonder, and yes, it’s a seemingly odd thought at first, but let me explain this to you as we go along.

After the great video game crash in 1983, during which the entire gaming industry collapsed, Nintendo established the software licensing model that we all know these days; game developers pay money to Nintendo, and in return they get the development tools and hardware to create games. On the flip-side, Nintendo can perform a quality-check on the games for their platform, and make sure that all games live up to a certain quality criteria. You will never see nudity, or any sexually-flavored games on Nintendo platforms because of this (though, that being said, there are extremely rare exceptions). It mainly serves to keep junk out; which was the cause of the earlier mentioned great north american video game crash.

Since establishing this model, every developer and their cat has jumped aboard the bandwagon and Nintendo and it’s platforms and games have flourished, creating the birthplace for the likes of Mario, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, Metroid, and F-Zero, games that many of use have come to love over the years. One thing that has always been clear to developers, though, was that Nintendo likes to favor well-established technology that’s cheap to come by, and has proven itself, as opposed to being on the cutting edge. The gameboy link cable for example has a striking resemblance with Firewire cables.

When looking across their product line, you can see they have been very consistent in using this approach with your very own eyes; The Gameboy Advance, Gamecube, and Wii (just to name a few), are prefect examples of this interesting habit. I also think it’s safe to say that as a result of this, they have always been in second (or third) place in terms of hardware. Fortunately, we all know that their exclusive games have always been where their game platforms made the difference. The gamecube wasn’t special, but The Wind Waker and Metroid Prime were, the Wii wasn’t all that interesting, but Wii Sports and Mario Galaxy are, and the GBA was just a Super Nintendo, but then we saw Golden Sun, Advance wars, and Metroid Fusion. It’s all coming back to me now!, good stuff. Read more

Industry choosing iphone, abandoning wii?

I think the iPhone makes a difference in the videogame space in a sense where it allows the industry to re-invent itself. Let me explain to you why.

If anything over the past few months stood out to me in terms of news and announcements, then I’d have to go with this trend of big developers and publishers seemingly losing interest in Nintendo’s white box of fun and starting to show their love to Apple’s iPhone. We’ve all seen big name publishers statements, thought mostly informal, with regards to the slow game sales on the Wii. And where some developers switch to PS3/360 development, others turned to the iPhone (or both). EA, Sega, Capcom, Square Enix and others have all started creating iPhone games in one form or the other. Read more

The Apple Ipad Plays games and lots of them.Run Iphone apps straight of the bat

Run Iphone apps straight of the bat.

But that wont fill the Ipad screen so it can also pixel double and run the apps full screen. Meaning all those Iphone games will run on the Ipad without any trouble. This all and a small list of big publishers and developers behind them this all might turn out nice for Apple. But we do have some question marks, like a 10 hour battery life.

More news as it breaks soon.

Beneath a Steel Sky now on iPhone App Store for €3,99 / $4,99

If you’ve loved The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition on your iPhone and are eager for more prettied-up vintage adventure gaming, may we submit for your consideration Revolution Software’s Beneath a Steel Sky Remastered? Actually, there’s no need for us to, because it’s already submitted to the App Store. Have fun playing.

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iPhone opens Flash to Developers

Adobe’s new App Store support to bring Flash gaming to Apple platforms

Software giant Adobe has revealed that its new authoring tools will allow Flash developers to release their games on iPhone.

Announced at Adobe’s Max industry conference, Adobe Flash Professional CS5 means numerous studios and individuals previously unable to create Apps for the Apple device will now be able to port their projects to the sensationally popular platform. Read more

BioShock Wil Hit The Mac Due October 2009

On October 7th, prepare to descend to the depths of the undersea city of Rapture when Feral Interactive releases the critically acclaimed BioShock® for Mac. Developed by 2K Boston and 2K Australia, and originally published by 2K Games, BioShock introduces gamers to an exciting world filled with fascinating characters, intelligent enemies and complex moral choices that define the foundation of the game’s world. With its rich story, meticulous attention to visual detail, tense action and infinite replay value, BioShock delivers the perfect blend of storytelling and first-person action.

Barely surviving a plane crash, the player lands in icy uncharted waters and discovers the undersea city of Rapture, a failed utopia whose citizens had embraced genetic engineering before descending into pure anarchy. Power and greed have run amok and the city has succumbed to civil war. To survive, gamers must turn everything they find into a weapon, use their powers of observation to piece together what happened and make the difficult decisions necessary in order to escape a paradise gone badly wrong.

Fans have embraced BioShock’s mysterious world filled with powerful technology and creative gameplay. BioShock is also renowned for its rich visual detail depicting a gorgeous Art Deco world set deep beneath the sea.

“The look and feel of BioShock is breathtaking,” said Feral Interactive’s David Stephen. “Combined with the remarkable depth and sophistication of the storyline, as well as the pure adrenaline rush of playing, BioShock will set new benchmarks for Mac gaming.”

BioShock will retail in North America for US $49.95, £34.99 (inc. VAT) in the UK and €39.95 (inc. VAT) throughout Europe.

Fishlabs at the Gamescom

When we met at the Fishlabs stand we got to speak to the executive vice president of sales Andreas Stecher and Swordfish PR Freyja Melborn.

Fishlabs is a company that develops games for the mobile phones such as Sony-Ericsson or Samsung, but at the moment their main focus is making apps and games for the iphone. Fishlabs is not some company that´s after big numbers, however; they seem to care more about making sure the customer is happy with their product. So basically, Fishlabs wants to develop better games than just the ´´casual´´ games which we also know as classic games.

The main reasons they focus on the iphone is because it’s easy to program and develop games on it. For instance, for the iphone they use just one coding language and for other mobile phones they would need to work with hundreds of different coding languages to program their game. Fishlabs really loves working with Apple because of the good contract they have; getting paid on a monthly basis and they get a lot of freedom to make games. They got approached by Sony to make games for the PSP, but companies like Sony and Nintendo won´t give them the freedom that they have from Apple to make games. So, for them, it´s a good investment to work with Apple.
Ever since they signed a contract with Apple to develop for Apple products, they got rid of all of their PC’s and replaced them with Apple computers.

The games they make are pretty popular all over the world, which is pretty complex sometimes with all the different billing rules for different countries and carriers. Their games are mostly popular in America, where 50% of their games are being downloaded.

Besides the popularity of game downloads, they also provide extra game content for download, which is also easier and cheaper on the iphone.

They don´t just make mobile phone games,  but also develop games on a gaming console called Zebo, which is pretty much a native console, and it´s as easy to develop games for as it is for the mobile phones. And Zebo is pretty popular in Brazil and Mexico.

In the future they want to hire more skilled people from the gaming world to make mobile phone games. Considering they already have some games that they want to take to the next level, like adding multiplayer options, which are not really that hard to do because there is already a possibility to get online with your mobile phone pretty easy, they need more skilled industry professionals. Unfortunately,  those people are hard to find because the skilled people want to make more complex and bigger games then just for the mobile phone. Maybe somewhere in the future when they get bigger they hope to get like a hundred people working there, but don´t want to lose their independence.
Right now they have three to four people working on making engines, which is more than enough to make engines for their mobile games.
But we will probably see more of them later in the future.