'BioShock' Coming to iOS Later This Summer

[macduke]

Has to be just a policy, and I agree. Maybe it was good in the early days to "train developers by force" to make mobile efficiency a priority, but it's time to lift the limit. (Some apps bypass it by downloading stuff later--but that's easier said than done too.)

There will still be an incentive not to use too much space: app size affects sales numbers. But if a dev wants to go all-out, they should be able to.

Yeah, 2GB was pretty big back in 2008—especially for a phone. But iOS 8 is only a few months away from 2015. If these devs want to start putting out AAA titles and charging AAA-like prices (or premium on the app store which is anything over $10-15) then that customer will expect it to be a large file size and will likely have a larger capacity iOS device to accommodate it. Premium games target premium buyers. They can't have their cake and eat it too. Jimmy the kid down the street with the hand-me-down 8GB iPod Touch likely isn't going to be buying $30-40 games on the app store. Not to even mention older devices won't even really take advantage of the increase in texture resolution.

The main limitation is space. I don't like the idea of having an SD card in an iPhone to store all my data, but it should be possible to use one just to store app data because iOS apps are static files, the same for every user, downloaded from Apple's servers when needed. Music files and such could get really cluttered if you could store them on SD cards, but apps would not.

I have an idea: You should be able to store all of your apps on your Time Capsule. Release an updated Time Capsule, give it a better name, and make it your local cloud. If you've got AC WiFi and the new iOS devices this autumn have AC WiFi, then you could easily have your larger games stored on something like that and they would quickly stream to all of your devices the necessary files. So you could have games on your phone that are in a cloud folder, and they might take 10-15 extra seconds to start up, but they won't eat up tons of space on your device. But then again maybe that would be too complicated to setup for the user—and cater to a niche market that would be doing higher-end gaming on iOS. Or maybe it could just keep a constant, local backup of your iCloud Drive, and store everything there for easy and fast local caching. But I still think Apple could tap the mid to mid-high end gaming market and make a profit, but it might take a couple years. The other thing is that maybe iOS devices will finally ship with 32GB standard this autumn, finally making storage limitation issues less relevant.

The thing is that if Apple keeps making development easier with things like Metal and Swift, then these game developers will be more likely to port or maybe even simultaneously launch AAA titles on iOS. And for Apple to even develop something like Metal means that they're beginning to take high-end iOS gaming seriously.

 

[Ichabod.]

With Metal & Swift, I imagine we'll see some very substantial demonstrations on September 9th!

 

[Ih8santa]

I'm not sure I would invest even $1 in such a game. But I can tell how excited some of you are..