The big difference here is that the iPhone will combine controller and screen, allowing the players to turn themselves while still being able to see what’s going on in the game world. When you try this on the Wii or with Playstation Move you will most likely end up watching your family sitting on the couch with the TV in your back.


Steve Jobs demoed the new feature by playing a game of Jenga (watch the video on YouTube). He moved the iPhone in certain ways to turn around the block of wooden tiles and touched the device to remove some of them. Afterwards he told the developers that this was a demo they quickly pulled together and that he can’t wait to see what the devs in the audience will be able to do with it. I can’t wait to see that either.


In the beginning developers will just dip their toes into it. After all, it’s a new playing field and the feature won’t be available for users with an old iPhone. Even if Apple sells a couple of millions of iPhone 4 devices fast it is a relatively limited market not leaving any space for expensive adventures. However we might eventually end up seeing games where players can walk around in virtual worlds, detect an enemy behind them and turn their whole body to aim at the target. Even greater are the possibilities for exploring 3D environments. You can look down to the floor, up to the ceiling, walk towards a window and lean out of it. There are a lot of options for first person shooters but also MMOs. These games rely on realistic virtual worlds and this can be the window to the world making its exploration more exciting than ever.


It will take a while until we see the first real approaches to something like this. Maybe it will also turn out that the iPhone’s screen is too small to create an immersive experience but it is to be expected that the much bigger iPad will eventually get a gyro, too. When this happens, the first experiments have been done on its smaller cousin and people will be ready for more.


The downside? Typically gamers aren’t weightlifters and holding an iPhone or an even heavier iPad straight in front of you for a long time will turn into an exercise. Also the iPhone’s battery is not ready for hour- long online gaming sessions yet. And you really don’t want to play a game where you turn yourself around 360 degrees with a cable plugged into the device. You might end up strangling yourself. The iPad#s battery last for about 10 hours but if you design a game which should allow players on both devices to join the same game world you have to keep the weakest link in the back of your head.


It is more likely that games will get adjusted and offer short bites of virtual world gameplay. Around 10-30 minutes per session should be fine until arms get weak or the phone’s battery reaches a level where one rather stops playing to have enough juice left for potential phone calls. Another option would be to include the gyro feature in mini games embedded into a more traditional game. That way arms could get a rest until for instance the hero has to do a certain task or starts a fight (bow and arrow tower defence anyone?)


What do you think? Will the gyro change the way we play on mobile devices and if so, what will developers be able to do with it?

According to the Financial Times quoting IDC, most of the growth on the laptop market comes from netbooks (small, lightweight PCs on Windows or Linux, destined first and foremost to browse the web – the most famous one is the adorable little Asus Eee PC, of which I am a proud owner). IDC expects them to represent as much as 11-12% of the laptop market in 2009.

This is interesting as the last figures I had seen from IDC last April were that laptops were already making for the vast majority of the consumer PC market (70% of home PC market in Europe). According to Liliputing, 70% of the netbook worldwide sales are in Europe, thanks to bundles and sponsored offers by telco providers looking to recoup their expensive 3G investments and hoping for a new growth path in a saturated mobile phone market : usually , you get the netbook for free or very cheap, and pay for 3G minutes or unlimited subscription deal. Apparently hardware companies such as Intel were expecting this segment to thrive mainly in developing countries, and were surprised at its success in developed countries.

These mini-notebooks can be perceived as a challenge for the games industry : lower performance, no video card, no DVD drive, reduced screen resolution, Linux OS on a good part of them, very little storage space (users are expected to use mostly web, cloud-based apps). It represents an extra step in the hard task of setting minimum specs requirements, which was already difficult if you wanted to have a game playable on average laptops (the jungle of integrated chipsets specs was already making it a difficult process).

But they also represent an opportunity for online games, as they might expand the PC user base and grant immediate access to the internet everywhere without necessarily a need for a Wi-Fi hotspot. Comparatively  to an iPhone/smartphone , they have a bigger screen, a more convenient keyboard, can run Flash and are an open platform. The Eee doesn’t come with pre-installed games as far as I know (at least mine didn’t), but its tagline is “Easy to work, easy to learn, easy to play”, targeting people with little previous computing experience and selling them games as part of the experience.

This seems good news for accessibility in games, browser-based being the most obvious answer. Recently, we were talking to a developer and they were explaining that they wouldn’t want to make their game browser-based because they wanted to have particle effects. When you look at the percentage of downloads non completed for free to play games (on projects we worked on, we estimated it at 70% of attempted downloads), factor in the number of people who give up before even trying to download, and when you add to the mix this evolution in the hardware installed base, it really makes each particle in the particle effect very, very expensive in terms of customer acquisition costs. And consumer reluctance will probably only increase as downloading a client will become less and less common in a lot of areas other than gaming – Microsoft announced a few weeks ago a suite of web apps, Azure, as an answer to Google Docs,  Joost has launched in September a browser-based app, only after having lost a lot of ground to Hulu, etc.

In any case, it will be interesting to see if the netbook trend will reinforce Europe’s current advance in browser-based games, or if the US will catch up as WiMax develops there and similar mobile broadband +netbook bundles will appear.

EDIT : Interestingly, we’re starting to see Android ports to netbooks. One step more toward a Google offensive on cloud-savvy OS for PCs?

• November Steam Hardware Survey (which is skewed towards “gamers” system in comparison to general PC user base)- shows DX10 system (DX10 capable GPU + Vista) accounts for 21% of Steam user base – in progress, but DX8, 9 and older GPU systems are still the majority (54%). On the other hand, multi-core is now majoritary (60%, with 10% quad-core).
• Speaking of Steam, the new beta version is integrating an in-game web browser. It’s good to see that multi-tasking is now embraced more and more. It looks better than Rogue, but less adavanced than PlayXpert (but they have all the other Steam features they can integrate with).

• Is the VC model broken? (It’s been published a while ago, but still interesting to watch. Can it mean an opportunity for the few cash-rich publishers to play a bigger role in funding?). Also, don’t miss Jussi’s and Adam’s article about online-game related VC investment defying dowturn in October.
• Street Fighter HD designer reveals console patch frustration. He states that it’s ok because SF is an old game and very little testing was required, but otherwise he would have been forced to test it on PC…