Few among the many groups waiting anxiously to discover the details of the iPhone 6 have as much riding on the nitty-gritty of the announcement as mobile games developers.
There were smiles at Apple’s new, more powerful A8 system-on-a-chip, the silicon at the heart of the iPhone 6, but also consternation at the knowledge that two new form factors would have to be supported, and worry that the company’s touted “50% increase in graphics power” might not match the 185% increase in the number of pixels the phone will have to render on the top-end iPhone 6 Plus.
The company boasted developer support from companies including Epic, Ubisoft, Gameloft, EA, Disney and Super Evil MegaCorp, whose co-founder Stephan Sherman demonstrated Vain Glory, a new multiplayer battle arena.
While Apple gave developers a coded heads-up that change was afoot, in the form of a session at its developer conference about how to build “adaptive apps”, games developers have more specific requirements than most.
When control systems require pixel-precision, it is often not good enough to simply treat every device the same, and so developers frequently have to code specifically for each device they plan to support.
It is something smartphone game makers are becoming accustomed to, however. “For me the larger screen size is the single biggest weakness of the iPhone neatly dealt with,” says Tony Warriner of Revolution Software, whose Broken Sword games have sold over a million copies on iOS. “Ironically, games devs who’ve already had to deal with Android screen size fragmentation are now perfectly placed to handle the new machines without too much trouble.”
While having to tweak their games to support both 4.7 inch and 5.5 inch screens, as well as the existing iPhone 5S’s 4 inch screen, might give developers more work, Apple has provided a carrot to ease the way: iOS 8’s “Metal” graphics API.
The new operating system, launching alongside the phones is named after the practice of coding “closer to the metal”: avoiding the abstractions that make development easier in favour of more direct access to the computing power of the device. With Metal, Apple promises to end that trade-off.
“Metal enables incredibly high performance for sophisticated graphics rendering and computational tasks,” the company says. “Metal eliminates many performance bottlenecks that are found in traditional graphics APIs.” Vain Glory, Super Evil MegaCorp’s game, is one game built on Metal, and Sherman described the devices as offering “console quality graphics”.
For some in the games industry, the new Apple Pay system was the most intriguing announcement of the night. “At last, a secure approach to phone-based NFC, leveraging Apple’s existing TouchID,” says mobile Oscar Clark, a gaming consultant at EverPlay. “I really hope that the system is compatible with those already in place for Android devices. If it is, then this is what we will look back on in five years as groundbreaking.”
There’s also interest in Apple’s final announcement of the night: Apple Watch. “The close integration with the iOS eco-system is good to see,” says Colin Anderson, founder of Dundee-based studio, Denki. “We’re already beginning to think about the opportunities for new forms of games and entertainment using the taptic feedback system.”
Apple estimates that the worldwide “app economy” will add $86bn (£53bn) to worldwide GDP this year and a large fraction of that comes in the form of mobile gaming, a sector with an annual revenue estimated at more that $10bn worldwide.
