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Apple Introduces Game Center for Leaderboards and Achievements

This will only be good if it doesn't require an iTunes account for each user.

I share an iTunes account with two other people in my house and it would be terrible to find that we were all required to share an account to use Game Center.
 
McLarenTopTeam said:
Complete rip off of MS Xbox LIVE. What happened to innovation Apple? It looks like Apple is following the real innovators.
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Name a feature that Xbox Live does not currently have that you want in this new system.....

Tough huh? Xbox Live is one of the few MS products I am proud to be a customer of. It's just done right. Even at $40 a year, it's an easy purchase for me.

So what do you do? Build an XBL clone and call it 1.0 . Then see what happens in iPad/iPhone gaming and build upon it from there. If this is free to customers and to devs and more powerful than the networks we have now, it is a huge, huge deal.
 
chuckiej said:
Name a feature that Xbox Live does not currently have that you want in this new system.....

Tough huh? Xbox Live is one of the few MS products I am proud to be a customer of. It's just done right. Even at $40 a year, it's an easy purchase for me.

So what do you do? Build an XBL clone and call it 1.0 . Then see what happens in iPad/iPhone gaming and build upon it from there. If this is free to customers and to devs and more powerful than the networks we have now, it is a huge, huge deal.
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I think it is following PSN more than XBL. Example: cross game invites, party system, chatting (text, audio, video) all integrated in Live, not so much in PSN (yet).

I wonder if they will be able to beat MS to the punch on cross platform game play. (It was demoed at MIX10 with 360, PC, and WP7S)
 
McLarenTopTeam said:
Complete rip off of MS Xbox LIVE. What happened to innovation Apple? It looks like Apple is following the real innovators.
Click to expand...

Microsoft always understood two target audiences that Apple never "got": Corporations and Gamers.

Now, in the year 2010, Apple finally seems to realize that gamers are also consumers, and if Apple wants to extend their market reach, they have to serve Gamers -- an audience they had a sincere dislike for in the past.

It'll be a tough catch up chase for Apple. Microsoft is DECADES ahead of them in that market. And Gamers are very loyal Microsoft customers, because that's where they always found what they were looking for.

When titles in the league of the original Doom, Unreal Tournament, Half-Life or Gears of War come out as iPhone/iPod/iPad/Mac exclusives, Apple has touched base. Until then, they're just another wannabe and will always try to catch up.
 
When you post a review on iTunes is that name unique? If so that will that be your gamer tag.

They didn't say if Game Center is reliant on OS4. I've still yet to upgrade my iPhone, broken screen and all but will be interested in the service when the iPad arrives on British shores.

Xbox Live is overrated. PSN is free just like this will most certainly be and more than adequate.
 
Sparced said:
When you post a review on iTunes is that name unique? If so that will that be your gamer tag.

They didn't say if Game Center is reliant on OS4. I've still yet to upgrade my iPhone, broken screen and all but will be interested in the service when the iPad arrives on British shores.

Xbox Live is overrated. PSN is free just like this will most certainly be and more than adequate.
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There are things that PSN is missing compared to XBL. Which is why XBL isn't overrated.
 
Steam

If Steam wasn't already due out on the Mac I'd say that Apple should be focusing on a system like that (iTunes for games).
Actually, there should be a Mac App store just as there is the iPhone/iPod/iPad App store. I want to buy my next version of iLife and iWork online.
 
NebulaClash said:
Uh, no, it doesn't. That would be an example of an ad that "sucks," and Steve explicitly said he won't do that. If you pay for a movie or TV show, you've earned the right to avoid ads.
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Ok, and it's easy enough to extend my point implicitly to include Apple serving ads in other content, including reduced cost or free advertisement supported media. I never said the middle of your $1.29 John Mayer track would be interrupted by an iAd.

And...
you sure your idea of what sucks and Steve's idea of what sucks are so similar?
 
Winni said:
When titles in the league of the original Doom, Unreal Tournament, Half-Life or Gears of War come out as iPhone/iPod/iPad/Mac exclusives, Apple has touched base. Until then, they're just another wannabe and will always try to catch up.
Click to expand...

Two of those were not Windows exclusives- Doom was originally released for both DOS and NextSTEP (the predecessor to Mac OS X). Unreal Tournament was released on Mac within a couple months of the Windows version. For the other two games you mentioned, one was made by a bunch of ex-Microsoft employees who quit to form a game studio and the other was published by Microsoft. Halo, by the way, was supposed to be a Mac game, except Microsoft really wanted a good launch title for the Xbox so they bought the studio and told them to release it as an Xbox exclusive.
 
MisterK said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

I totally called this. Feeling pretty smug about my prediction.

This is less about xbox live and more about Facebook. The developers if Mafia wars and farmville can now make a comparable experience on iPhone and ipad. Lack of Flash aside (you can make those games using a number of technologies) the biggest obstacle was the social widgets; competing against family and friends.

Xbox live is fine, but there are more people playing farmville each month than there are Twitter accounts. Facebook is the target. Add micro transactions and Apple's 30% cut of the original app itself and you've got a pretty potent revenue stream.
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I think this is ********. Are you really trying to tell me that Mafia wars and Farmville are games?? They are repetative pieces of crap!
 
They really need to create a universal controller for the iphone/ipod.

Once I get my arcade box for my ipad, the world will know my dominance in frogger.
 
Part of being an advertising firm is knowing as much about your audience as possible. Apple no doubt already collects lots of metrics on customers about their music consumption patterns, their movie consumption, their TV consumption, and now books and soon newspapers, magazines and other print media. Beyond unifying the iPhone gaming multiplayer experience, Game Center will no doubt give Apple a lot of information about what customers like to play, how they play it, who they play it with, maybe even where they play it. I'm not exactly sure about what they are going to do with all this information, for better or worse, but seeing that many companies are collecting all sorts or information on our usage patterns, particularly Google, it's not surprising that Apple is spreading out in this area.

On another note, I hope Apple considers rolling out Game Center as an SDK for Mac and PC, maybe associated with iTunes/iTunes Accounts given it's ubiquity. For one, it'll encourage developers to use cross-platform multiplayer solutions unlike say Games for Windows Live or other proprietary Windows solutions. For another, I think there are plenty of opportunities to provide a more integrated Mac/PC and iPhone gaming experience where perhaps progress on one unlocks features in another or a tightly integrated storyline where say the computer version plays out as a FPS whereas the iPhone version plays out as RTS optimal for each platform with a storyline that fits into a great whole yet each still a complete game separately.
 
Winni said:
Microsoft always understood two target audiences that Apple never "got": Corporations and Gamers.

Now, in the year 2010, Apple finally seems to realize that gamers are also consumers, and if Apple wants to extend their market reach, they have to serve Gamers -- an audience they had a sincere dislike for in the past.

It'll be a tough catch up chase for Apple. Microsoft is DECADES ahead of them in that market. And Gamers are very loyal Microsoft customers, because that's where they always found what they were looking for.

When titles in the league of the original Doom, Unreal Tournament, Half-Life or Gears of War come out as iPhone/iPod/iPad/Mac exclusives, Apple has touched base. Until then, they're just another wannabe and will always try to catch up.
Click to expand...

Ha Ha LMAO! Well said. I always like you post, straight and to the point.
 
justinfreid said:
Ok, and it's easy enough to extend my point implicitly to include Apple serving ads in other content, including reduced cost or free advertisement supported media. I never said the middle of your $1.29 John Mayer track would be interrupted by an iAd.

And...
you sure your idea of what sucks and Steve's idea of what sucks are so similar?
Click to expand...

Thank you for clarifying your view. I thought you were talking about content being interrupted by an ad.

Do I think my views and Steve's views on what is good and what sucks matches? Hard to say, of course, but I've noticed that what he approves in product design matches my tastes very well, and when he hates something I tend to as well. So yes, if he says current ads suck, I tend to think I know what he means.
 
NebulaClash said:
Thank you for clarifying your view. I thought you were talking about content being interrupted by an ad.

Do I think my views and Steve's views on what is good and what sucks matches? Hard to say, of course, but I've noticed that what he approves in product design matches my tastes very well, and when he hates something I tend to as well. So yes, if he says current ads suck, I tend to think I know what he means.
Click to expand...

No problem; it's nice that you went back and read my response. ;)
 
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