Doom guy: tablets, phones to be gaming platforms of the future
Mobile kit will soon be more powerful than consoles, says Carmack
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id Software's John Carmack has talked up the future of mobile gaming and why tablets, smartphones and cloud-gaming services such as OnLive will become the dominant gaming platforms.
The man behind FPS classics from Doom to Quake shared his views in an interview with IndustryGamers.
"It’s unquestionable that within a very short time, we’re going to have portable cell phones that are more powerful than the current-gen consoles," he said.
"People have exaggerated the relative powers - the iPad2 is not more powerful than the 360," he admitted. "It’s still a factor of a couple weaker. But the fact that it’s gotten that close that fast - that means that almost certainly, two years from now, there will be mobile devices more powerful than what we’re doing all these fabulous games on right now."
And it's happening quickly: "When we started Rage, iOS didn’t exist. There was no iPhone. All of that has happened just in the space of one project development timeline."
The benefits of mobile gaming shouldn't be underestimated, Carmack reckons: "Convenience is a huge thing. I think that mobile is getting a lot of wins on convenience and I do think that streaming services like OnLive have a future… even though it’s not going to necessarily be the same graphical quality of latency quality, but a whole lot of convenience can make up for [what's lacking]."
There you have it, Commander Keen has spoken, it must be true. What do you think? ®
COMMENTS
Not again
Sure, modern smartphones have high end CPUs and GPUs, and will have more powerfull chips than current gen consoles in the near future, just as they have more crunch than last gen consoles now.
One slight problem, though. The mouse might fit in my pocket, but neither the keyboard nor a 30" screen will. Ego shooter on a smartphone or tablet? Come on, even joypads are sub par.
Still stuck on power and graphics :(
What amazes me is these numbnuts are still stuck on the power and graphics mantra after the way-behind-the-power-curve Wii and the Nintendo DS basically owned the 360 and PS3.
Yeah mobile gaming is probably going to do to consoles what consoles did to the PC game market, but not because mobile platform reaches a console spec, its becasue it finally got up to a minimum spec to be useful and is a damm sight more convienent and the limitations of the platform mean they'll have to focus on a little thing called gameplay rather than how they can overdrive the gpu.
Invented the FPS
two words - "MIDI Maze".
Anon - for flame protection
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