Atendees of CES got to see the future of mobile gaming with the announcement of the NVIDIA Shield. We believe this shows how and why Android will ultimately win the mobile gaming battle with iOS, nintendo DS, and sony vita.
In this article IGN gives a fair summary of the Shield’s capabilities and shows gameplay video.
Some are skeptical, like this extreme tech article talks about how the Ouya and the slightly cheaper GameStick will defeat this upstart.
As a developer, we are very excited by what the NVIDIA shield represents rather than necessarily what it is. Why?
1. iOS is currently the king of mobile gaming
iOS and the apple app store are generally the first store where games are introduced. If they do well, they are then ported to android. Android users are second in the minds of content producers, like Hollywood movies which later get translated into Arabic.
2. A touch interface is great for some games, but terrible for most
As a long time gamer, if evaluating a new game and I see a “virtual stick” in the interface, I skip it. Touch based controls do not provide the kind of tactile feedback necessary for playing platformers, action games, and many other types of games. There is a reason the console systems have always had gamepads and not a mouse (or wiimote). It most effectively translates the users desires to the game.
For mobile gaming to expand outside of the casual phone market and really take on Nintendo and Sony it starts with the controls. The Shield addresses this head on giving an “xbox style” controller.
3. As a developer, I want a consistent platform to target my game to
I have no interest in building a game for iOS that utilizes a 3rd party bluetooth controller that a player “might” have. If I’m going to go through the effort of making a game, I want to be certain everyone can experience the game as i intended it to be played. The shield achieves this: I know that every person with a shield will have the identical gaming experience I have in my office when I built the game. This makes my time testing and tweaking the game valuable.
4. And this is why Android will Win
Whether the shield succeeds verses the Ouya or the game stick or whatever else is about to come along, is not what is important. What is important is what OS we are talking about with these platforms: Android. All of the mobile/console gaming innovation is coming out of Android. Will Apple create a gaming device like the shield? Never. So this means the thinkers, the innovators, the dreamers are all thinking, innovating, and dreaming on Android. And this is what will push Android based gaming to being THE platform games will debut on.
Sorry Apple, you should have listened to Steve Jobs when in 1994 he said in The Lost Interview (available on US netflix) “The reason Macintosh succeeded is because there were many industry partners who benefited from its success. The reason IBM ultimately beat Apple in PC’s is because so many 3rd parties benefited.”
Who benefits from iOS dominating the gaming scene? Apple.
Who benefits from Android dominating? Google, nvidia, samsung, htc, sony, etc…
