My question is about resolution. Not all the App Store's games are built resolution-independent. Can they simply scale up, as-is, to tablet (or table) size and still look good? Sure, this low-rez YouTube video looks okay, but presuming a future Apple tablet will have the same crisp high-resolution of the current iPhone -- plus a heckuva lot of additional pixels -- what kind of degradation of quality will happen if a game is simply scaled up? Games that look good and crisp on the little iPhone will suddenly look soft on the big tablet. (Kinda like trying to watch standard def on a giant HDTV... no thanks.) So won't a game have to be reconfigured, reprogrammed, recompiled, and in some cases even redesigned for the higher resolution? And won't that be a big pain in the rear-end for developers? What am I missing here?
It's mostly 2D assets that would have to be re-done, I imagine. 2D games would certainly look blurry, because the included graphics are made for a 320x480 screen, so devs would have to re-release their apps/games with either:
• multiple versions of the app (introduces complexity to the purchasing process unless the App Store automatically screens out apps that aren't compatible with the particular device you're using),
• multiple versions of the graphical resources in a single app (increases app size and download time, and wastes space unless each device — or iTunes — can remove unneeded files during sync), or
• only the big versions of the graphics (which would introduce a performance hit for smaller devices like iPhone and iPod touch that needed to scale everything down on-the-fly and swap memory like a crazy mofo).
To me, assuming Apple handled it right (i.e. taking care of everything on the back end to reduce apparent complexity), the first option sounds the tidiest to me. Ask developers to submit screen-optimized versions of their apps, and the App Store will take care of showing the right stuff on the right screens.
3D games would have to have their 2D textures gussied up, but they could leave their 3D assets as they were unless they became obviously fugly when viewed at a larger size.
As for whether a game or app would have to be redesigned, that's a choice the developer would have to make themselves. Some control schemes that work wonderfully on an iPhone-sized screen would fall apart on a larger device; some would scale up nicely. It's a case-by-case problem, and some apps would probably end up only being available for one "class" of device.
