Epic: No Immediate Plans to Bring Infinity Blade to Android
Those who haven’t been keeping up with the iOS gaming scene might not know that Infinity Blades – a high quality slasher by Epic Games – was released this week. Naturally, gaming folks want to know if Epic will be bringing it to Android. Although they still have plans to bring the Unreal Engine to Android, them developing their own games isn’t something they’ve had the desire to do.
I’ll let you guess his reasoning. Come up with anything yet? No? Fragmentation, of course. Echoing John Carmack of id Software’s sentiments, dealing with Android isn’t something they want to focus on right now because as there’s a lot of good hardware, it’s all over the place.
That’s fair, but why lock yourself into iOS? The smartphone market is funny because it seems to get completely opposite forms of reaction from developers compared to the PC market. Developers have no problems with developing a game against a minimum set of specifications and letting users know what they need to run the games. With PCs (mainly those running windows) there are desktops and laptops, some with dedicated graphics and some without, some with a beefy processor and some with Pentium 3 processors. And some run Windows 2000 while some run the latest and greatest.
Android is the same way, so why not treat it the same way? There are some very powerful phones out right now and there will be a lot more powerful phones in the coming year. The reality is that not everyone’s going to get the same experience. Only those who pony up the cash to own cutting edge technology will be able to run cutting edge software at the end of the day. Something tells me Mark Rein is more concerned about making a profit on Android – which I would’ve taken as a good reason as to why they would only want to focus on iOS – but this whole fragmentation circus is just starting to scream “laziness” to me. [via Pocket Gamer]