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Apple To Developers: Fuck You
Posts
If there's one thing the iPhone has guaranteed, its that they won't try and make a portable successor to the Pippin.
A 21% sudden loss of profit is pretty staggering for the biggest video game company in the world, but I think it's a little premature to place that all at the feet of the iPhone digging into the DS' turf.
The anti-Wii backlash has been long in the coming, and seems (financially) to be hitting its stride right now. Developers are tired of losing money and time porting over games that won't sell, and the public is tired of playing the same game with Nintendo across three systems now, i.e., buying a console only to play a handful of 1st-party titles.
I haven't looked at it in a few months, but in a similar discussion I had at one point about Nintendo and their sales outlook, I noted that while Nintendo overwhelmingly dominates the marketshare in terms of titles sold, in their top Current and top Overall categories you don't see a third-party title for quite a while; the ratio is something stupid in their top sales categories, like fifteen first-party titles for every third-party.
Not only that, but at the very top of their sales lists are not traditional gaming titles, but things like Wii Sports (comes with the system), Wii Games (comes with an extra controller), and Wii Fit (comes with Wii Board). The bottom line is quite obvious: no one is playing games on the Wii. They may be using the Wii quite a bit, and Mario, Metroid, and Zelda will always do well, but outside of those functions, no one is using the Wii.
And why should they? While it is admittedly inexpensive, it's also fairly low on utility. It's graphics are nearing on two-generations old, its data capacity is extremely limited compared to the competition (which, in turn, limits the gaming experience), its limited tertiary functions like News and Weather are unwieldy and childish, the Opera browser is practically unusable, and while the recent addition of Netflix capability is nice, it doesn't allow for their HD output, nor does it play DVDs or Blu-Ray discs. Is WiiWare valuable? It could be, but I'm not sure about the long-term viability of a model that asks $10 and up for truncated mini-games, or $5 and up for NES/SNES games that everyone already has paid for on other systems or can play for free via online emulators.
Long story short, Apple is indeed a threat to Nintendo, and Nintendo is wise to acknowledge this. The iPad, iPod touch, and iPhone are basically better models of the DS, offering viewing size, graphical capability, screen brightness, catalog depth, and value that Nintendo can't even hope to compete with on their increasingly-obsolete handheld. The iProducts don't even need a clumsy stylus, but will let you still use one if you want. Sure, the DSixl is a cheaper option even over the iPhone, but let's hope that all you want to do is play games, because it's sure not going to be the thousands of other things that the iProducts can be.
A lot of things are to blame for the decreasing profitshare for Nintendo; the economy, the Wii console's age, the lack of developers, the lack of titles, Apple coming to be a big-hitter in the handheld market. But Nintendo's #1 obstacle? Themselves.
That is what you get for living outside the Greatest Country in the World (tm).
I'm sure he's already heard that from a rep. [strike]at an Apple Store in Brazil[/strike] in an email from Apple. Old news.
Yeah, cause nothing is better than waiting 9+ years for standards to be agreed upon, and then implemented... maybe within 5 years... and maybe with similar browser implementation.
Joe Hewitt said it better (as consolidated by techcrunch) http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/joe-hewitt-web-development/
Oh Steve, don't you know that once you pay the danegeld, you'll never get rid of the Dane?
Link? And what the hell's a danegeld?
Vikings.
I figured it was something norse, but I think it's kind of a stretch to say the PTC are a group of vikings pillaging Apple headquarters and raping Steve Jobs.
If you don't mind reading Daring Fireball (Gruber is a huge Apple cheerleader, so be warned, though I think the summary's mostly a summary and not a rah-rah) there's a summary of some of the changes: http://daringfireball.net/2010/09/app_store_guidelines
Not really terrible as far as i can tell.
Apple ends middleware ban.
App Store review guidelines highlights.
As for the danegeld line, its a paraphrase of the last line of a poem that points out that once you give into an extortionist (which the PTC very much is), they don't go away.
I haven't head that specific post yet but hopefully his tears will be delicious. It was his two posts on the original banning that generated all the talking points for the "pro-apple fucking over developers" camp. To have apple so publically reverse it's decision must be quite a shock to his psyche.
The PTC is a pretty horrible group. They are responsible for almost all obscenity complaints (we are talking three nines or better here) to the FCC. They have been behind pushes for video game restriction laws.
The only response they merit is one consisting of two words, one of which is "you". I'll let you figure out what the other one is.
Sourcewatch on the PTC.
Which is to be expected. He didn't apologize for defending Apple's attack on the First Amendment, after all.
(His "stop emailing me about Judith Miller" post was hilarious, though.)
what was apple's "attack on the First Amendment" again?
you do realize that you come off as kind of breathless and overwrought, right AH? It kind of makes it difficult for people to take what you're saying seriously.
it seems like their central objection was to lazy flash-based shovelware, and that they tried to erect a structure around that idea.
which i can see, especially since flash for mobile devices sucks so much
i'm sure i would dislike the group
and i noticed that they felt like that apple did not adhere to their requests to the extent that they wanted.
i guess i feel like the particular thing that apple changed does not feel objectionable to me.
Apple v. Does, where Apple tried to claim that bloggers were not journalists and that trade secret law trumped freedom of the press.
one of their rules for rejection is "if your software's metadata mentions any other mobile platform"
oh yeah i don't care that much about that. i guess i see it as legitimately competing interests.
it makes sense that companies would try to protect trade secrets. i guess i'm also fine that the finding was against them though.
I'm guessing this is why they eased the restrictions, now that Android is getting more and more attention.