QUOTE
EA and Ubisoft do crap, period. I rather would like to see people like
INTROVERSION developing for the Pandora
True, a lot of the Monolithic Publisher's games are poor and repetitive. As was mentioned, no large publishers will see the benefit of developing for a 'niche' platform. Unfortunately this is a Catch-22 situation, as if a large publisher showed support for the system, it would massively increase media exposure of the system and sales, making it a viable platform. This, alas, is wishful thinking.
It might be possible to get some developers like Introversion onboard, and small time developers are more likely to take on a project like this (as there's no dev kit cost), and are more likely to respond to emails suggesting that they do so.
Well, Introversion make games with big investments. They most certainly won't make a game for P&|a. What they might do is ports but Darwinia and Defcon are probably too heavy on resources. I've seen that there is some sort of Uplink devkit available. Maybe somebody could use that to port the engine and then we could buy the content and play the game on P&|a.
AnonymousTipster said:
QUOTE
I want to see more games from Apex Designs, including a Pandora version of Payback smile.gif
That's the sort of developer that might work for the Pandora.
If the gp2x version of payback was at all profitable for Apex Designs, I expect they'd probably do a Pandora version too.
A Payback port would be great and probably not that much of an investment.
AnonymousTipster said:
EDIT:
I was actually just looking at some sales figures.
The GP2X was expected to reach 50000 units sold by Christmas 2006, without any commercial software.
The Gizmondo released with support from EA and Fathammer, launching with 14 commercial titles, but only sold 25,000 units.
If the Pandora is going to sell as well as the GP2X, then there is a chance that it could get the attention of larger publishers to make a few titles for it.
Well, the Gametrac (I'm still not using the new name... ) was a project by the Swedish mafia. They spent lots of money to get those deals. The whole thing was never intended to sell and with the awful design it could never have. The intention behind the project was to scam investors for money to spend on Ferraris.
^^^ This is how the Gametrac actually crashed ^^^
Story:
http://www.wreckedexotics.com/special/enzo/
Let's stay realistic. We are not going to get EA games. We are not going to get ID games developed for P&|a.
What will be possible is ports of games with open engines. That includes ID games, Transport Tycoon and quite a few more. What I'd like to see is these games available for sale readily packaged at an official store. The way it's now you get the engine for free, get the content somewhere else legally, or if that's difficult, illegally and then take a look at the readme to sew it together so that it works. Then you notice that you got the wrong version of the content files and you need a special tool to convert the music. It would be great to just buy a working package and it would make more people get the legal version so everybody would profit from that. It would also provide good marketing for the platform because you couldn't just say "Q3 and TTD run on this." but "We have got official AAA games like Q3 and TTD!".
The next possibility is indie games. There are a lot of great PC indie games but most of these would probably be hard to port. It's also not easy to convince developers to develop especially for a platform this new and small. What most people here don't seem to realize is that there are a lot of great handheld indie games made for Windows Mobile and Palm. There were lots of awesome games on the Zodiac because it ran Palm OS! It needs to be easy for developers to expand their cross platform development to mobile Linux devices. Working together with other mobile Linux platforms like OpenMoko would probably be a good idea. I want Bike or Die, The Quest, Warfare Inc., Snails and Mazera on my P&|a! Once the P&|a is ready for spotlight I'll contact everyone I know from the Palm scene and try to find out what is possible.
So it probably isn't that difficult to get a few big name games and lots of awesome indie games for P&|a. It only takes some effort in spreading the word and a positive spirit towards commercial games in the community. What we have to prevent at the root is the expectation that there will be classic mainstream games. There are the DS and PSP for that, we don't want and don't need those.
