iGame Radio

We are well aware of the lack of love that sometimes surges from Apple when it comes to gaming. But fear not, for there was much in the way of gaming goodness to see and hear at the WWDC keynote this morning.

With 5200 attendees from 57 countries attending over 120 sessions and sold out in 8 days, the World Wide Developers Conference began with a flourish today with the annual keynote, given by Steve Jobs. There were tons of rumors and speculation as to what would be announced and, thanks to Gizmodo, we were certain that one of those announcements would be in the form of a new iPhone.

But what about us Mac gamers? We weren’t left out, as many announcements at the keynote were filled with gaming goodness.

Steve Jobs began his chat with developers attending WWDC with a review of how well the iPad has been doing since launch. In less than 60 days, 2 million iPads have sold in 10 countries, with plans to be in 19 countries by the end of July. The iPad already has over 8500 native apps, resulting in 17 apps per iPad. Amongst the iPad apps that Jobs bragged about were a number of games, including Iron Man, Avatar and Fieldrunners.

Jobs next stated that the App Store supports two platforms: the App Store platform and the HTML5 standard. “A fully open, uncontrolled platform that is forged and defined by widely-respected standards bodies,” Jobs said, referring to HTML5. One can debate how uncontrolled the standard is when Apple itself has a controlling interest, but it is certainly far more open than the App Store itself.

As proof of this support for HTML5, Jobs revealed two new games that have been developed using the standard. Farmville by Zynga and Guitar Hero by Activision. Farmville was demoed on stage with CEO Mark Pincus by Jobs’ side, and Senior VP of Activision Karthik Bala helped demo the Guitar Hero app.

Apple also revealed the long awaited next generation iPhone, called the iPhone 4. This phone is stuffed with features that will make every game developer drool. Among them is a front and back-facing camera, for games that would include image or video of live environments. Remember The Movies by Feral Interactive? Imagine taking live footage and creating movies in competitive gaming environments.

Another feature is called the Retina Display. Basically, the iPhone 4′s display has four times as many pixels as previous iPhones in the same screen size, bringing the resolution to 326 ppi and sharpening text and images. The human eye can’t differentiate at anything below 300 ppi, so that means that the iPhone 4 will show the sharpest visuals on the screen. The Retina Display is 3.5 inches in a 960×640 display resulting in a 800:1 contrast ratio; 4x better than 3GS.

The real question is whether such a refined detail will make a huge difference in game visuals on such a small screen. Certainly for a game that doesn’t have a large amount of detail this could really sharpen and refine the visuals there. But when there is so much detail squeezed onto a small screen, it brings into question whether finer lines will help see all of the detail. Small is still small, especially with an aging gamer population.

The iPhone 4 will be powered by Apple’s new A4 chip. Apple also increased battery size, and together Apple claims the iPhone 4 will provide 40% more talk time for the average user. But how will this impact gaming time? Jobs went into detail about usage time for various activities: 5 to 7 hours of talk time; 6 hours of 3G browsing; 10 hours of Wi-Fi browsing; 10 hours of video; 40 hours of music; 300 hours of standby. One could come to some conclusions based on this, depending on the type of gaming involved, that app gaming would result in about 8 to 10 hours of use, while online gaming would be more like 6 to 8 hours. Of course, these are estimates only, based on Apple’s claimed numbers. Your mileage will vary in the real world.

Jobs also stated that the speed capabilities of this unit are much higher than its predecessors. The iPhone 4 can reach download speeds of 7.2 mbps and upload speeds of 5.8 mbps…once carriers support those speeds. Which means not now for us in the States. But, once those speeds are supported, the type of online games that can be created will be astounding. Larger amounts of data can be downloaded in the same time, resulting in games with better graphics, and even cloud-based server games where most of the data is sitting on a cloud server. I would expect the next iPad update to include this speed limit, too.

The next feature just blows my mind. iPhone 4 has a gyroscope. Seriously. We’re talking a 3-axis gyro that controls pitch, roll, and yaw. Together with the accelerometer this means 6-axis motion sensing for extremely precise positioning in games. Jobs demoed the gyroscope feature by playing a game of Jenga while twirling around on stage. Eventually the tower fell.

The real question is how many developers will actually take advantage of the CoreMotion API to create games using this feature? The iPhone 3GS introduced the compass, but how many games actually used this feature? I really don’t remember seeing many at all. The real future of a feature is how much it is used.

The new iPhone OS was revealed in detail as well, but it won’t be called iPhone OS 4.0. No, the name is now iOS 4. In theory this makes perfect sense, since the OS will be placed in the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad eventually. But try typing that three times fast.

There are 1500 new developer APIs in this OS, with 100 new user features, including, of course, the previously announced multitasking. A rumor that persisted for a while was that Bing would replace Google as the default search engine. Bing did make an appearance, but not to replace Google. They will be working side-by-side, with Google sill the default. I wonder how many will actually put Bing as the default on their iPhone?

The iOS 4 is at gold master candidate status and is in the hands of developers today. And I’ve already seen a few responses to what developers have experienced. Perhaps “XCODE 4 IS AWESOME” says it all. According to Jobs, iOS 4 will ship “soon”.

Last but not least, Jobs spoke about iAds. Since the announcement of iAds on April 8th, we’ve not seen much about what it can do. Today we got a demo of the advertising platform to be included in iOS 4. The feature is built so that developers can include it in their apps in an afternoon’s worth of work and place the ad in the app where they want to. App users can access the ad without clicking out of the app, but the ad won’t start on its own upon starting the app, either. I get the impression that the ads are supposed to work more as a viral meme. You will want to click on them because you’ve heard that they are neat and awesome all on their own.

Advertisers that have already signed up include Nissan, Citibank, Unilever, AT&T, Chanel, GE, Liberty Mutual, State Farm, Geico, Campbell’s, Sears, JCPenney, Target, Best Buy, DirecTV, TBS, and Disney. Based on these early commitments, in just the last 8 weeks, Jobs said that iAds can expect as much as $60 million. JP Morgan had placed $250 million on the entire mobile advertising market for the remainder of the year. Oops.

Developers will see a return rate of 60% for advertising from iAds that they place in their apps. I found this to be an interesting number. Revenue return on the App Store is 70%. Add to that Jobs’ stated reason for starting iAds in the first place (“To help our developers earn money so they continue to create free and low-cost apps for users”) and you start to wonder why the rate is at 60% rather than 70% (or higher).

Another question is whether the advertisements will start to eclipse apps themselves. Looking at some of the iPhone games in the App Store, one could imagine becoming more enamored of the animated ad then the low quality game it is feeding off of. Some game developers are just starting out, but many of these ads will be produced by professional animators. And will advertisers be able to refuse ads on certain apps?

One other big rumor did not pan out either. There was no announcement of Apple breaking away from the AT&T network. In fact, along with the stated release date for the iPhone 4 (June 24th) came an offer by AT&T to give up to 6 months of early eligibility to an iPhone 4 with the same contract you have now. If your plan ends before the end of 2010, you can take advantage of this offer without having to start up a whole new 2 year contract.

The iPhone 4 will come in black and white, with pre-orders starting June 15th. You can start purchasing the new phone on June 24th. The pricing is what we’ve come to expect, $199 for the 16GB version, $299 for the 32GB. Apple will be shipping to the U.S., France, Germany, the UK and Japan in June, with the iPhone 4 available in 88 countries by the end of September.

The iOS 4, as previously mentioned, will be released “soon”. But when it is, it will be available for all iPhones and all iPod Touches for free (but not first generations). The iPhone 3G will not have access to all features in iOS 4.