for the future –we think monetisation will sort itself out in time as larger budget niches for mobile development grow. These things take time, just like how generating revenue through ads in mobile apps took time to start to take off.”
Games are a great way to help mobile companies display
IF ANYTHING SERVES as evidence that middleware is thriving on a platform, it is when those behind highly specific solutions move to support the device. That is something that has
certainly happened within the mobile sector, with companies like real-time sky and 3D cloud rendering tool provider Sundog already supporting hardware that not so long ago only sported black and white screens. “We started off developing
a Unity version of our SilverLining Sky, Cloud, and Weather SDK last October,
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which opened us up to all the platforms Unity supports, including iOS and Android,” explains Frank Kane, Sundog founder. “It wasn’t as hard as we thought it would be. Building on that, we went closer to the metal and developed an Android library version of SilverLining in mostly native code – which again wasn’t all that hard, as our source code was cross- platform and supported OpenGL from the start.” Depending on the level of
interest Kane and his team see from Android, iOS is next on their target list.
the advantages of their platform over others.
Andrew Bowell, Havok
ALL TOGETHER NOW Other than the issues of evolving a workable pricing model for mobile games tools, another key theme driving those behind the solutions is collaboration. Having spent years working on plug-ins, and with other companies’ pipelines, tools providers are more familiar than most in the games business with cooperating with would-be rivals, but there is still a way to go in the mobile arena. And, as it happens, collaboration with the
hardware companies themselves is helping to progress the very platforms that host these games.
“I think the mobile hardware companies
have already learned that games are a great way to push their tech and help them display the advantages of their platform over others,” suggests Bowell. “That fact has moved many hardware
companies to open up native access to their hardware and establish ecosystems that support games developers. Ultimately this benefits tools, technology companies and games developers alike.” Unity CEO and founder David Helgason
agrees with Bowell’s assertions. The relationship between tech makers and mobile hardware producers is vital for all that occupy the triptych that sees games, tools and hardware as a single entity. “We do work closely with most of them,”
says Helgason of the mobile manufacturers. “It’s about pedestrian – but important – things like testing and certification to make sure that Unity games work on new devices, but also collaboration on enabling new functionality and optimising existing capabilities. And, of course, working together on marketing to show both consumers and developers what’s really possible.”
THE FUTURE’S BRIGHT Looking ahead at how tools for mobile games development will advance, perhaps predictably optimism abounds. But developments in hardware capabilities