Unity Engine Not Coming To Windows Phone 7

[Momo]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/38561/Unity_Engine_Not_Coming_To_Windows_Phone_7.php

Unity Technologies CEO David Helgason says the closed design of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 environment means the platform won't be getting support from the company's popular game engine.

Speaking to Develop, Helgason said the company couldn't support the Windows Phone OS because it's "a relatively closed system, so you can't run native content."

Windows Phone 7 currently only supports apps written in Microsoft's XNA or Silverlight environments, and a special exemption is required to allow for third-party engines.

Unity has been in discussions with Microsoft to get such an exemption, Helgason said, "but they couldn’t open up the platform, and that led to us deciding to not support it."

While the Unity engine could be rewritten to work with Microsoft's environment, as has been done with Flash, that move "would require a huge amount of work [with] uncertain results," he added.

That said, Helgason said the company is looking ahead to Windows Phone 8 and is hoping "it will be easier to work on that system."

Unity's engine currently supports development on iOS and Android, as well as PC, Mac, web browsers and the major home video game consoles.

Windows Phone 7's app marketplace currently has roughly 39,000 apps, 16 percent of which are filed in the games category, according to WP7AppList.

Microsoft's mobile platform has had trouble making a significant impact in the U.S., representing only 5.6 percent of all smartphone users according to a recent comScore report.

Whatever happened to developers, developers, developers, developers?

Hoping Ms courts more middleware makers with WP8 as the mobile gaming market can do with more than Android and iOS (RIM/WebOS/Symbian and all those dead OS's doesn't count, if you say so then lol)

[Mupepe]

Uncertain results?  There was a report not too long ago that showed that even though the market share was smaller on the WP7, a lot of apps were outselling their android counterpart.  Sounds like a little bit of both sides being stubborn.

[MCD]

Apps and system features first, games later.

Speaking as the voice of Windows Phone here.

[Momo]

Apps and system features first, games later.

Speaking as the voice of Windows Phone here.

Android and iOS has laid out a good roadmap for other OS's to loosely follow, they don't need to reinvent the wheel in this regard. One would think that with xbox live integration coming they would court middleware makers more aggressively to support it, as well as make them the defacto standard mobile gaming OS. 

[MCD]

Waiting is part of being a MS bitch.

So wait till next year when Windows 8 hits retail then people will see how beautiful Metro and finally start buying Windows Phones.

But this is all my fan fiction so whatever.

[Momo]

MS will need to disrupt iOS and especially Android though, imo a UI won't do that. Maybe games could?

[AdmiralViscen]

 

[chronovore]

Uncertain results?  There was a report not too long ago that showed that even though the market share was smaller on the WP7, a lot of apps were outselling their android counterpart.  Sounds like a little bit of both sides being stubborn.

I'll preface with, as usual, I'm talking out of my ass, but: There was a similar effect with Mac software, I recall. Even though there was a smaller install base, the few games which came out for Mac sold relatively well. The reason seemed to be that because there are just so few games on Mac, the audience was ready to pay for whatever they could get.

[recursivelyenumerable]

advice dog sez:

write games in c#

NEVER HEAP ALLOCATE