Cutting the Mustards
Chair Entertainment's Donald and Geremy talk Infinity Blade, iPad 2 and the App Store
I think so. I don't know that they intentionally became the handheld device of choice. They certainly made a device capable of it and now that market has emerged. I think if you look at some of the ways in which they've approached other media - renting movies, AppleTV, whatever - they haven't rigidly stuck to that 99 cent price model that they established with iTunes for a song.
I don't think that they are opposed to the concept of a more diversified price range in their market. I hope that, as the breadth of stuff evolves, of what you actually want on these devices, so will the market place.
Their attitude to games has certainly changed. Three years ago, I believe you could find quotes of them saying "the iPhone is not a gaming device", regardless of how many games were on there. But now it's undeniable, their attitudes are definitely changing.
Their last press event, the apps they showed were almost exclusively games. Game Centre is obviously something that they've put together and supporting. The event today [announcing iPad 2], Infinity Blade was a prominent part of that. So their attitudes are changing.
They're coming to us more for advice about changes to hardware, they're looping the games industry into their thoughts. Whether they like it or not is one question, but they obviously see the benefit.
What are the numbers? I believe it's something like over 50 per cent of the revenue that they make on the App Store, is from games. They definitely see that it's a huge, huge market.
It feels like it. Yesterday the iPhone 4 was the most powerful Apple device for touch gaming, now it's not, now it's the iPad 2.
The iPad 2 has awesome new stuff. The processing power has significantly improved over the iPhone 4, which is amazing. The memory is now in the right place. There's now 512mb of memory, which is pretty critical for the things we want to be able to do. It's hitting all the right stuff. It's a marked leap from the iPhone 4. I think we can do some pretty impressive stuff on it.
A lot of people are complaining about the iPad's screen resolution not changing with this iteration, not going to the Retina density of resolution, but I actually think that's a good thing, for games especially. To make a high end game like Infinity Blade, the processing power per pixel matters.
So if they had doubled or tripled the density of that screen, it would have crippled our ability to make high-res games. Whereas with the same resolution and, like, nine times the graphical power in the iPad 2, we'll be able to do significantly more high end AAA effects.
Post processing and shadows - there's a lot that we think we'll be able to do.
It's a big leap, getting it even closer to the current generation consoles.