Over the past couple of days, we've spoken to mills at design studio-come-developer ustwo, and Spencer Britton from Flash developer BlueskyNorth about the impact of Adobe's new Notus technology.
Now it's time to grab the opinions of Nigel Little, MD at Distinctive Developments
One of the most experienced mobile developers, it has the technical knowledge to make great native iPhone apps already, so what does Little think about the announcement?
Pocket Gamer: Is making it easier to make native Flash games a good thing for developers?
Nigel Little: For those web game developers and publishers who have a large back catalogue of Flash games, then this will be a golden opportunity. They will still have to do some work to shrink their games down to the screen size of the iPhone but that's still a lot easier than porting the game to Objective-C.
However, if you're making your living converting Flash games to the iPhone then it's very bad news indeed.
What are the limitations compared a proper iPhone native app?
Flash is a very competent technology and allows very rapid development. However, if you want to push the hardware to the limit or do unique special effects then you will still have to use Objective-C. Also, Flash doesn't currently have great 3D support either so the majority of 3D games will still be native.
I expect Flash games will quickly dominate the low end of the price range of iPhone apps but the premium games will be proper native games.
Do you think this will flood the App Store in terms of the increase in new releases?
We may very well see an increase in the number of releases. The App Store is pretty saturated right now and a lot of the games on there are inspired by a Flash game, if not a conversion of a Flash game, so a lot of these Flash games developers are going to be competing with existing iPhone games that have the same core concept.
The App Store will still be a very hit driven market where only a few games make a profit but the ones that do will make it big.
Thanks to Nigel for his time.
You can keep up to date with Distinctive Developments via its website, Twitter, or on Facebook.
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Contributing Editor
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.
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