How Apple Re-Defines Mobile App Gaming for Developers?

With Apple garnering support from big names in the gaming world such as EA, Epic, Gameloft, Ubisoft, Disney and Super Evil MegaCorp, developers have reasons to smile.

At the developer conference, Apple announced a session on how to build highly targeted and adaptive games, for the new-age users?

Apple predicts that the global app ecosystem will generate revenue of $86bn, this year, to global GDP. A large fraction of it will come from mobile gaming. An annual revenue estimates of over $10bn, globally.

Let’s take a look at what Apple has to offer mobile game developers.

Apple has built a Retina HD resolution. Both the iPhones are bigger, better and faster.

• 4.7-inch display: 1334-by-750-pixel resolution at 326 ppi
• 5.5-inch display: 1920-by-1080-pixel resolution at 401 ppi
• iPhone 6 High Contrast Ratio 1400:1
• iPhone 6 Plus Contrast Ratio 1300:1
• iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus processors are quad-core with 2 GB RAM
• It has a 16 GB, 64 GB and a 128 GB version

Surely, this means a lot for iOS mobile game developers.

iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus have a 64-bit A8 processor. It comes with 2 billion transistors. This indicates that iPhone will have 50% faster graphics and will be 25% faster than ordinary computing. This makes them smaller, faster and economical to produce and less battery-intensive to run. iPhone 6 Plus has 285% more pixels than the 5S, which is a pretty big leap.

According to Apple, it is bringing Metal to iOS 8. This will allow GPU and CPU to offer graphics with more detailing and enable faster computations. Using Metal, the traditionally inherent problems of graphics APIs can be minimized. The aim of Metal is to explore the contemporary gaming considerations such as shared memory, multi-processing, making it easier to run GPU commands. What Metal offers is a focused API, X-code tools, better computation of shading language and overall unified graphics.

According to analyst Rob Enderle, bigger screens will help to offer better gaming experience to its users. As mobile app development are more concentrated towards big screen games. Undoubtedly, bigger screen is better.

Keeping in mind its mobile gamers, Apple presented a demo of Vainglory, a multi-player battle online game. Its creators Super Evil MegaCorp, are on to console-gaming of the new iPhones. Thanks to the extra processing power of iPhone 6, Vainglory has turned out awesomely stunning. It is being run at 60 frames per second and shows-off tons of skilful particle and lighting effects, running at supremely higher resolutions.

The new A8 processor has a M8 motion co-processor. It processes data from compass, accelerometer, gyroscope, and the new barometer. As of now, this may not mean anything in mobile gaming. Nevertheless, some of the charismatic applications and mobile games have started to integrated motion controls like moving their phone around to aim. All this can go through improvements with the new M8 motion co-processor.

According to statistics, consumers spent 20.77 billion dollars on video games, hardware and accessories in 2012. In 2014, this number is predicted to be $24 billion.

Apple has a host of opportunities to exploit in the world of mobile gaming. With iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus staging a better show for mobile app developers, they might achieve better user-engagement, enhanced gaming experiences and higher ROI.

Looking around the trends, Apple seems quite late to arrive on the gaming front, unlike its counterparts Android and Samsung.

It still remains to see if Apple re-defines the gaming industry with its power-packed innovations or simply plays along?