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Unity CEO disses Jobs on gaming

by Mike Schramm Jul 13th 2010 at 8:00PM

Unity CEO David Helgason gave a talk at the Develop conference, going on this week in Brighton, England, and had some harsh words for Steve Jobs on supporting iPhone gaming. Jobs previously said that using "middleware" like Unity to develop iPhone games "produces sub-standard apps," but Helgason fires back that Jobs "doesn't understand the economics of game development fundamentally." Most developers, Helgason seems to be saying, can't be jack-of-all-trades with their code -- they need libraries like Unity to do some of the lifting, especially on smaller-scale platforms like the App Store.

Stuart Dredge at Mobile Entertainment is doing a great job of covering all of the other iPhone gaming news coming out of Develop as well -- he's got talks by the developers of Ngmoco's Godfinger, Rolando's Simon Oliver, and Ideaworks Game Studio, the company that brought World at War: Zombies to the iPhone for Activision (that last talk sounds similar to the one we saw earlier this year at GDC).

If there's a theme among everything developers are saying, it's probably that they're finding flexibility a must on the App Store -- while an app may be developed with one feature or pay model in mind, things often have to change quickly during development or even after the app goes live. Lots of interesting things to read in there if you're interested in iPhone game development.

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Unity CEO David Helgason gave a talk at the Develop conference, going on this week in Brighton, England, and had some harsh words for Steve...
 

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Kambrose

I am the first to admit that Steve Jobs is a genius, but this just doesn't make sense at all. As many have said, most game developers on the App Store are small time. There is no way most of them have the time or money to spend creating their own game engine, especially in 3D. I'm not really a game developer, but I've played with Unity for iPhone and it is not some hashed up piece of software! This is some quality software. If Apple wants to get rid of small indie game developers on the App Store they are certainly taking the right steps with their new license agreement, but frankly I don't think this is what they want. Forget Flash, Unity and Torque are way more important to iPhone game development. Apple should let Unity sort out their own bugs and deal with it. If their(Unity's) software doesn't work all of the sudden with the iPhone they can fix it. This is all rather short-sighted on Apple's part if you ask me...

July 14 2010 at 2:59 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Stu

Are you all getting the real point here - Apple have reworded their developer terms and conditions to fully prevent anybody from developing on the Unity platform - lets not forget the big Adobe Flash hoo haa, you write flash code to create the graphics, animation and interaction elements, and Apple dont want any 'interpreted code' like this running on their devices. Its the same for Unity - they could find themselves out of the iDevices arena completely, a huge hit on sales.
.
From Steve Jobs, April 2010, Thoughts on Flash, pretty much also encompasses Unity - "We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers."

July 14 2010 at 1:33 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Stu's comment
BobsRoad

if what you said was at all true, why are unity apps still being accepted and many games in top 10, and bigger companies starting to use it. apple is not going to ban unity.

just cause they do not want flash does not mean they hate indies, or hate games
or want to stifle cross platform development . if that was true why can u make
a webapp for iphone and bypass appstore . why do they include java on osx

July 15 2010 at 6:49 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
iDarbert

Meh, he's right.
You need all the help you can get to deploy a game, middleware is one of them.

You can't realistically expect developers to code their own engines from scratch, it's great if you can but it shouldn't be necessary unless you really want to.

July 14 2010 at 10:06 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Bob Thedino

If every game developer had to write their own 3D graphics, physics and sound engines from scratch (to name but a few) we'd see about one or two new games per year.

This whole "middleware sucks" thing from Jobs was aimed at booting Flash-developed stuff off of the iPhone, that's all.

July 14 2010 at 9:16 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Bug

" especially on smaller-scale platforms like the App Store."
Erm. Ok.

July 14 2010 at 7:33 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to Bug's comment
SIP

He probably meant scale of the iDevices rather than the volume of sales handled by the AppStore.

July 14 2010 at 9:06 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Donavan

This may be earth shattering news to you but compare to the market size for consoles and PC games, the app store is a small market. Combine that with the race to the bottom on iOS app pricing and it's an even smaller market.

July 14 2010 at 1:40 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
AceMcLoud

Jobs is sorta right when it comes to regular applications which users expect to adhere to the standard OS GUI, guidelines and behaviours. Games are different though:

1) they all have custom GUIs. When the performance is ok nobody will know the difference.
2) iPhone SDK includes lots of classes and GUI elements for creating regular applications - it is an application framework. It includes little for game developers, so they need something like Unity. I'm sure (hope) Jobs is aware of that.

July 14 2010 at 5:23 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
firstnamelioksaqw

yeah, i agree on that point with Brian. the more important you become, the more dung you get! the only way to avoid it is to ignore that!

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July 14 2010 at 3:05 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Twist

I agree with David Helgason completely here. I don't think it matters what tools are used to develop a product as long as the product is held to certain standards when it is released. I haven't personally used Unity to develop anything but from what I have seen it is a good product that outputs code that is just fine. Its not something like REALBasic that outputs code that is so horrible you can spot an app made with it from 10 feet away.

July 13 2010 at 9:21 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Twist's comment
Geoff Perlman

Could you elaborate? Exactly what is it about the compiled code created by our compiler that is so bad you can spot it a mile away?

July 14 2010 at 9:31 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
brian

It's impossible to please everyone. No matter what Apple does, some people will be unhappy. I think it's pretty clear from history that Apple is very unlikely to change their mind, so sorry, but deal with it.

July 13 2010 at 8:49 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Nelson

If anyone is interested, here is a partial list of games (half way down the page) that are built with Unity for the iPhone.
http://unity3d.com/gallery/game-list/

July 13 2010 at 8:45 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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