Developer calls for changes to unleash creativity and compete with Apple's GameCenter.
For a comparison of gaming software development on Apple iOS and Microsoft Windows Phone 7, check out this blog post by programmer Kevin Hoffman.
Hoffman is a Windows developers (he’s written books on .Net programming, for example), but also an avid iOS developer for iPhone. Most recently, he’s been working extensively with Windows Phone 7. That gives him the fairly rare ability to make straightup comparisons between the two platforms from a programmer viewpoint. [See, from April 2010, “Windows Phone 7 vs. iPhone matchup: a developer’s perspective”]
His basic point: Apple’s online GameCenter provides a platform for casual, multiplayer games created by a wide range of independent developers, but Microsoft’s Xbox Live currently does not. Hoffman writes, “the top selling games on the iTunes app store, after you remove the blockbusters by companies like EA, etc, are… drumroll…. casual, multi-player, social games. Here’s to hoping that Microsoft throws us a bone in the near future, or at least something to chew on while we wait for WP7′s sandboxed Xbox Live, if such a thing will ever exist.”
Xbox Live is structured differently from GameCenter, in two ways, according to Hoffman.
First, in practice, Xbox Live is restricted to approved “Xbox Live partners.” Under the current terms of the app marketplace, “your Silverlight application may NEVER make any API calls to any of the core gamer libraries provided for Xbox Live,” Hoffman writes. “This immediately rules out casual games written using Silverlight that have multi-player, social aspects.” But the casual game developer can’t solve this by turning to XNA Studio, the toolset used for complex games. Why? “Here’s the rub: You can’t access the Xbox Live APIs unless you’re an approved Xbox Live partner,” says Hoffman. And becoming one is, as they say, non-trivial.
Second, Xbox Live as a community or “ecosystem” that runs on what Hoffman calls a global “currency,” known as “gamerscore,”which reflects and measures the “hard work, time, effort, and (hopefully) fun players invested in earning their gamer score and unlocking their achievements.”
Hoffman: “This is a point value that every single Xbox Live gamer has on their gamertag. Every Xbox Live game a gamer plays will earn them both points and unlockable achievements. These are global. This means that every XBL gamer can see which achievements you have unlocked and what your total gamer score is – it’s part of your public profile. This is the currency by which relative wealth in the Xbox Live world is measured. Those with higher game score and rarer achievements are this ecosystem’s elite… the upper class.”
By contrast, Apple’s GameCenter keeps scores that are, in effect, locked to a specific game: there’s no comparable common ‘currency’ or ‘metric.
Hoffman wants the best of both worlds: “a mobile, ‘lite’ Xbox Live in which they [i.e., Microsoft] give developers access to points, leaderboards, achievements, and mobile-isolated multi-player APIs but without access to the global gamer score value,” an arrangement that will unleash the talent and enthusiasm of independent game developers for casual, multiplayer entertainment.
