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People keep complaining about games, which is funny because it is my job to make games using HTML5 and javascript.

No it is not good enough to produce an AAA title -- but those are far from the entire market.



Are you listening to yourself? Can you imagine a "smartphone" mobile platform without AAA game titles?

I'm assuming they will have some sort of NDK?

Neat project none the less!


Can you imagine a "smartphone" mobile platform without AAA game titles?

Absolutely. When the iPhone came out it had no AAA game titles- the major publishers held off until they saw what the market was like. I remember my first purchase (and addiction) being some sort of tank-shooting game that was little more than a glorified QBasic Gorillas.

Don't get me wrong, they'd need AAA games eventually, but everything has to start somewhere.


Everything has to start somewhere. Unfortunately, this starting point has moved since the iPhone first came out. Microsoft learned this with Windows Phone; there is reasonable (but low) adoption, unfortunately due to missing features that developers and users consider to be standard, the ecosystem is still missing a few apps and some of the existing apps are/were (things have improved a little since 7.5) lower-featured than those same apps on other platforms. Windows Phone 7 would have been the best thing ever invented if it was released in 2007. Firefox OS would be as well. Windows 95 would have been magic when it was released in 1985.

Everything has to start somewhere. But where it ends up is highly dependent on how far it was when it was released.


True, but being the open project it is, Firefox OS doesn't have the same kind of market pressure that WP, for example, does. They haven't even launched (in any consumer-facing sense), so it might be a little early to judge the platform.


Words with Friends, Draw Something, Angry Birds, etc.

None of these are AAA titles. All of these are, or were, hugely popular with their players.

If you cannot imagine a smartphone mobile platfrom without AAA game titles then the failure isn't as a result of that platform; the failure is your imagination.


It is not good enough to produce Minecraft.


I think you underestimate the speed of modern JS compilers. Minecraft is running in Java, so it's already GC'd which is the major failing of Javascript as a AAA game development language.


In general 3D and Javascript doesn't yet mix too well.

But if you think that Games must be in 3D, try out any number of the cool non 3d games on the app store and see that they don't have to be.

That said Minecraft is actually a pretty heavy game to run - it surprised me at first too, but even blocky graphics need a not of computation to work.




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