Re: Pullings from the iOS App Store
@Lord raven there are several points you raise here some of which I can answer.
First it is not that audio game releases "move to mobile devices" the likes of Gma games, Aprone Ian Humphries are still writing for pc and will continue to do so. The developers who have written for mobile platforms are usually developers who come to audiogames development specifically with the desire to write audiogames for those platforms, or at least, with the idea of cross platform games in mind. To my knolidge, only Vip gameszone and Lworks of developers of usual pc audiogames have changed to writing games for mobile devices.
Also, bare in mind that the inherent accessibility in Ios with Voiceover means that far more independent games are actually accessible, or can be made so with some tweaking. Games like A dark room, Adventure to fate, lost cities, king of dragon pass or Timecrest were not written exclusively with the idea of a visually impared audience in mind, it just so happened that they could be made accessible relatively easily on Ios given the way voiceover works (I'm less sure about Android).
I also don't think the distribution method, ie, the use of an ap store is really anything to do with a developer's choice to write for a specific platform, hence why people don't write games for the windows ap store. There are a lot of things that can be done on mobile platforms due to the motion sensative inputs and touch screen that simply would not work on a Pc, indeed while theoretically you could write a port of pappasangre 2 or audio defense zombie arena to work with the arrow keys, it would lose a great deal of the experience you get through playing the game on a mobile device.
Even for a game like Adventure to fate, the way you navigate the game and get information via the touch screen is very different to what you'd do on a pc, indeed I suspect were the adventure to fate games written for pc, some e xtra work would have to go in to their access to make the game screens understandable with a screen reader, (even assuming they used screen reader friendly text in the first place, the Pc port of King of dragon pass certainly doesn't). To a lesser extent the same goes for timed notifications in a game like Timecrest.
This isn't to say I think everything! should move to the mobile platform, just that there are certain quite legitimate reasons involving game mechanics that make the mobile platform interesting in terms of it's development possibilities, indeed that was why I got an Iphone in the first place.
As to downloadable content.
I don't think lack of extra content is a reflection of a developer's lack of work, sometimes something is just finished because it's finished, indeed as I said I personally regard lack of compatibility for software in the os as the responsability of the developers of that os, it's only the likes of mic
rosoft and other such idiotic corporations who have persuaded everyone that developers need to work to their tune not the other way around as it should be.
I agree that I'd love to see some games like Vg storm's expanded with extra content, but I don't think that's really related to whether a game is available on pc, ios or whatever else, since we've already seen several games with various types of extra content available on various platforms. Look at the choiceofgames and hosted games titles, many of which have extras to buy and all of which are available on Pc, Ios, Android, and a number of other platforms including steam.
Then there is smugglers 5 for Pc, with it's dlcs, zero site with it's extended operations expantion, and time of conflict 2.0 which came with massive expanded maps and was available to 1.0 customers, not to mention Castaways with it's extra mission releases.
There are also plenty of free games with a huge
amount of extra available content, either user created or released over time, beatstar, rythm rage, lone wolf, adventure at C: Swamp, etc.
Also bare in mind that a lot of the "extra content" available for Ios titles is either like extra donation currency in an online browser game or mud (adventure to fate's fate gems for instance), or are simply free updates no different to the successive updates to something like Crazy party or Castaways, indeed while the centralized distribution method gives massive amounts more power to Apple, what actually gets distributed via the ap store isn't on the face of it so different from what's been done in game terms back since the dos days and people were sent their version upgrades and extra content on floppy disks through the post .
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