We have a skype chat where a whole bunch of the ex-Zynga senior technologists (we called them CTO’s) get to chat about stuff we learned.
One thing that came up was our attempts to come up with web-mobile-backend cross platform technology. As a key driver of this effort, I learned that this was a misguided attempt.
Because I like the immediacy of the dialog I am including the skype chat:
[] kostadis roussos: if I was going to enumerate my biggest professional mistake it would be to completely misunderstand the mobile gaming market need for specialized gaming engines targeted at specific games.
[] kostadis roussos: The reality was that I didn’t understand the importance of having a hyper-optimized game for a specific platform and that it was more important to have the BEST game implementation than leverage.
[] kostadis roussos: That leverage was basically unimportant – as a gaming company – … What was important was delivering the best possible user experience.
[] XXX: it’s a fundamentally hard problem to solve and i think what I took away is being polyglot is preferable
[] XXX: it seems like you’re really just talking about the failures of flash/html5 on mobile, not so much a “specialized gaming engine” since cocos2d / unreal / unity are all cross platform
[] kostadis roussos: @XXX – intriguingly in 2013 when we did a whole bunch of analysis 8/10 games had their own custom engines.
[] kostadis roussos: Maybe the data has shifted – and I’ll accept that notion but you really need to have a highly customizable engine where you are not giving up any performance or user-experience .
[] kostadis roussos: My point is that I completely misunderstood the centrality of that point. I didn’t get that we need to think of a game as CMS with a very optimized and specialized “rendering” system and that we needed to have the best one for any game genre or we would lose.
[ kostadis roussos: And so I pursued – html5 as a solution, flash as a solution and then PlayScript language we built – all of these were attempts to solve the wrong problem. We should have been building the best UX system for I/E games in native languages with some C++ for the business logic bits that could be shared across multiple platforms.
[] kostadis roussos: Oh well. Lesson learned.
My only personal consolation was that I gave the prezi guys some good advice based on my learnings. They feel good about the outcome.
IMO, we’re just reliving the middle ages of the pc years. Mobile devices (and their batteries) are getting stronger year after year on a slow controlled scale. At some point unity will probably own everything, but as long as there’s hardware out there that can’t run it well we’re stuck with whatever tool works best for a given project.
I kinda-agree. I actually think mobile = console gaming. The big difference with consoles vs PC’s is that the controlled hardware made it possible to deliver a consistent experience of 60 FPS that was not FUBAR’ed by drivers, midplanes, chipsets etc to all of your customers. Mobile devices offer the same kind of promise.
As for whether unity wins that’s an interesting question. I would bet on unity being a significant player etc. I guess it depends on your definition of winning.