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Infinity Blade Becomes Fastest-Grossing iOS App
by Simon Parkin [PC, Console/PC]
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December 13, 2010
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Epic Games' action-RPG Infinity Blade has become the fastest-grossing app on the App Store.
Data pulled from Apple's Game Center (collated by Appmodo) indicates that the game, which retails for $5.99 on the store, generated over $1.6 million in sales in the four days following its release.
According to Game Center figures, the game had 271,424 users as of this morning. The previous fastest-grossing record for a game on the App Store was set by Chillingo's puzzle game, Cut the Rope which generated in excess of $1 million in 10 days.
Gamasutra reported on Friday that Infinity Blade, the first Unreal Engine 3 game for iOS, had immediately topped iPad game sales in its debut week, pushing former chart leaders Angry Birds Seasons HD and Angry Birds HD to second and third place respectively.
The project was unveiled at Apple's September 2010 event under the name Project Sword and has appeared in ad campaigns for the iPhone 4 ever since.
Michael Capps, president of Epic Games, said of the release: "With Infinity Blade, [we have] created an amazing-looking, incredibly fun game that really demonstrates the potential of triple-A mobile gaming."
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The Android operating system software stack consists of Java applications running on a Java based object oriented application framework on top of Java core libraries running on a Dalvik virtual machine featuring JIT compilation.
The key word there is "Java-based": Java apps don't run on it natively (but can be ported over). But to all intents and purposes, unless you're willing to go down the NDK route, Android is subject to the same limitations as a standard Java system.
But anyway. I've no doubt that an Android phone could run a UE3 title; the problem is that a 3D game like this needs considerably more processing power than something like Angry Birds, and with at least 3 different GPUs, a dozen or so CPU and RAM variations (256mb, 512mb, 600mhz, 800mhz, 1ghz), getting the game to run consistently across the entire range of available Android handsets would be an expensive nightmare...
Knowing that user can refund their money, any reasonable developer would want to be sure that it runs smooth on every device that can access it.. otherwise they just set myself up for a lot of tech support and complaining from users who can't run the game right..
Look at angry birds.. they make a free version and people complain about the free version, when the fact is that i doubt they tested it on the easily dozens of phones accessing the same marketplace
Also Epic was very clear that they have no plans to make an android version for the foreseeable future.. iPhone is enough as the sales of this game clearly show.
Epic knows what they are doing and i'm sure that they have no bias against android other than the number of technical hurdles it would take to make it work well on enough of the units in circulation that could match the supported graphic abilities of the supported iPhones.
Fortunately, Unity3D has done a firecracker job making their platform support Android, so I'm excited that there is a solution out that can allow a game to be made for both platforms.
So no worries about the lowest denominator, Apple has already abandoned those devices. And who needs fragmentations from different device manufactures, when Apple has done a bang up job doing that to their own system with the variants of CPUs, GPUs, OS versions, and screen rezes.
It's there, maybe not on the same scale, but it's not all fine and dandy as some of the zealots would like to believe. Anyways, to ignore Android is just as dumb as it is to ignore iOS.