I would disagree that adding gamepad support for existing games will be "trivial" especially if you care about the game experience at all.
Changing the input type for a game in most cases fundamentally changes what the game is. It can also mean that the difficultly curve has to be adjusted significantly because things that used to be hard suddenly become easy and vice versa.
For a good example of this , look at the original Unreal Tournament on the PC. The maps on this game take huge advantage of the vertical space and allow for precision shooting over large distances thanks to the mouse.
Now look at popular FPS games on consoles, most use way less in terms of the vertical space and typically incorporate some form of aiming assist to make distance shots possible.
Having the OS based on android will provide some advantage is re-usable game code but I think this overstates the issues when it comes to porting to different platforms.
Jiggy, it's very clear from your posts on this thread that you are clueless about both game and android development. You jump from flawed argument to a different flawed argument after the first flaw is pointed out. You seem to be more worried about criticizing the ouya out of criticizing's sake, instead of being worried about the merit of your arguments. Why are you doing this? What is your motivation to continue with this?
I've already answered your argument in the very post you're replying to. I wonder if you're even bothering reading. Some games already support d-pad, others don't. For the ones that do, it will be trivial, the ones that don't, won't bother porting.
I often post on HN from somewhat of a devils advocate position (and assume others do the same), since that's more interesting than the sort of "+1 I love this!" type posts I see on other forums.
In reality of course I would love this console to succeed and in principle would prefer something like this to a closed console such as the XboX.
Regards the point about controls: The fact remains that the most popular games for android currently are designed around touch screen controls since the overwhelming majority of android devices out there are phones or tablets.
Sure , there are a few Android games that seemed to be designed for gamepads and were somehow shoehorned onto a touchscreen (the series of COD clone games who's name escaped me springs to mind). Sure, some of these could be salvaged into something playable on this console but I would think the difficulty would still need adjustment since people now have a proper gamepad rather than a touchscreen pad. Also I would doubt many of these games are particularly competitive with equivalent games for the XboX etc even with the controls fixed.
Historically having some impressive launch titles has been an important precursor to success for consoles. The combination of the release timescale combined with the lack of concrete information for developers means that it seems unlikely that such titles will appear in time.
In other words, whilst I personally love this idea, I have no idea how I would encourage less geeky friends to get one, saying "you can play the games that you can already play on your mobile phone" doesn't seem like it would cut it.
Comments
I would disagree that adding gamepad support for existing games will be "trivial" especially if you care about the game experience at all.
Changing the input type for a game in most cases fundamentally changes what the game is. It can also mean that the difficultly curve has to be adjusted significantly because things that used to be hard suddenly become easy and vice versa.
For a good example of this , look at the original Unreal Tournament on the PC. The maps on this game take huge advantage of the vertical space and allow for precision shooting over large distances thanks to the mouse.
Now look at popular FPS games on consoles, most use way less in terms of the vertical space and typically incorporate some form of aiming assist to make distance shots possible.
Having the OS based on android will provide some advantage is re-usable game code but I think this overstates the issues when it comes to porting to different platforms.
Jiggy, it's very clear from your posts on this thread that you are clueless about both game and android development. You jump from flawed argument to a different flawed argument after the first flaw is pointed out. You seem to be more worried about criticizing the ouya out of criticizing's sake, instead of being worried about the merit of your arguments. Why are you doing this? What is your motivation to continue with this?
I've already answered your argument in the very post you're replying to. I wonder if you're even bothering reading. Some games already support d-pad, others don't. For the ones that do, it will be trivial, the ones that don't, won't bother porting.
Thanks for the Ad hominem.
I often post on HN from somewhat of a devils advocate position (and assume others do the same), since that's more interesting than the sort of "+1 I love this!" type posts I see on other forums.
In reality of course I would love this console to succeed and in principle would prefer something like this to a closed console such as the XboX.
Regards the point about controls: The fact remains that the most popular games for android currently are designed around touch screen controls since the overwhelming majority of android devices out there are phones or tablets.
Sure , there are a few Android games that seemed to be designed for gamepads and were somehow shoehorned onto a touchscreen (the series of COD clone games who's name escaped me springs to mind). Sure, some of these could be salvaged into something playable on this console but I would think the difficulty would still need adjustment since people now have a proper gamepad rather than a touchscreen pad. Also I would doubt many of these games are particularly competitive with equivalent games for the XboX etc even with the controls fixed.
Historically having some impressive launch titles has been an important precursor to success for consoles. The combination of the release timescale combined with the lack of concrete information for developers means that it seems unlikely that such titles will appear in time.
In other words, whilst I personally love this idea, I have no idea how I would encourage less geeky friends to get one, saying "you can play the games that you can already play on your mobile phone" doesn't seem like it would cut it.