ho ho ho !
Either someone was just fired, or MS just stuffed an envelope of cash through the door with a note saying 'please with a cherry on top'.
Rovio has apparently changed its mind, with the company's CEO telling Reuters that a Windows Phone 7 port of Angry Birds in Space is in the offing, though he's not saying when. That contradicts what the company's chief marketing officer told Bloomberg earlier, but CEO outranks head of marketing so we're betting that Angry …
Or this was a deliberate plot to check how much attention / protests / comments such a rumor would attract.
If it wouldn't even be mention worthy you simply drop the whole thing and no one will be the wiser (or, as you suggested, you may even be compensated). If you do manage to stir up some protests you will know up front that you can expect at least /some/ sales.
Of course, Symbian phones do have Angry birds extra levels, plus Seasons and Rio (and are still being kept up-to-date, if a little behind other platforms). I wonder if this could be to do with Symbian supporting industry standard OpenGLES graphics interfaces, and Windows Phone (presumably) not supporting them? I can imagine the porting effort being somewhat larger for Windows Phone in that case.
Personally I'm hoping for a Symbian version, but I'm not really holding my breath.
So... OpenGL ES 2.0 is supported by iOS, Android, BlackBerry, WebGL, Maemo, Symbian, non-Android Samsung, Palm, Archos, and Raspberry Pi. Looks to me like all the key players.
Perhaps Redmond has to learn that when you come late to a market with established standards, you have to change the way you do things if you don't want to remain permanently sidelined.
I think the fact that Windows Phone 7.5 doesn't support any form of C would be a far more serious issue. GL / DirectX differences could be abstracted away but if you're meant to rewrite the app in a different language then that's a far more serious issue. Android supports C (or anything that can be built with C), so so does iOS. I expect 90-95% of the code can be made common to either platform with some glue for the UI, manifest, advertising APIs and so on.
.NET has managed and unmanaged C++ support. I suppose that if either of them were supported in Silverlight it might ease the issue but really MS should allow devs to produce apps in straight C++ in a sandbox. If they don't then apps especially games are going to lag behind what other platforms offer.
It's not worth a developer investing a lot of time and money porting to an OS that accounts for no more than 1.5% of the market. Unless someone is paying for your time. Otherwise your time is far more valuable spent on the continuing development of your products for 95% of the smartphone market. Simple business logic and economics really.
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I can certainly see Nokia paying Rovio not to support MeeGo - anything to help undermine their own platform/product and further eliminate competition from the market in the vain hope it drives sales towards their new lame duck platform.
What Nokia don't understand is that their former higher-paying customers now revile the company and their current strategy, leaving Nokia with the support of the low margin feature phone crowd and a few Microsoft loving simpletons (or more accurately, "the uninformed").
If market is indeed the deciding factor then everybody would port their games to Symbian too.
Market is a meaningless buzzword invented by a bunch of moronic suits whom suffer from RDF.
It's all about favouring phones that drain your wallets with absurd data-plans. And it's clear that the more technically adept phones actually save money instead of costing money. I'm thinking of phones that require data-plans to send a photo from one phone to another phone withing 2 meters from each other.
Meego is however a bigger market than WP7 so why bother with WP7 anyway? Port it to XBox instead ;-)
At the moment games for multiple platforms are written in cross-platform tools that are essentially C++ with wrappers. However, Windows Phone 7 only allows C# .NET so its a rewrite to support Windows Phone 7. Furthermore, unless the game is one of those hidden objects low resource games, coding on higher levels like .NET, there can be performance problems.
Windows Phone 8 supposedly supports native code which will remove this barrier. Until then, I can't see many games companies writing cross platform games for Windows Phone.
Windows Phone 8 supposedly supports native code which will remove this barrier. Until then, I can't see many games companies writing cross platform games for Windows Phone.
There is no market. Ok, so Ballmer paid these guyz to port it, but he won't be able to pay everyone all the time ... and I think a lot if not all the others will start crying to get some Microsoft cash. Also, everybody, even those lame blondes in the H&M store know that Windows Phone is for the sillier, whoever that may be.