A new era of iOS gaming

John Carmack’s demonstration of the Rage engine running on iOS and the recently released Epic Citadel technology demo seem to represent a sea-change in the view of large games houses to iOS as a gaming platform, moving it from a niche platform to one in which they are prepared to put significant engineering resource to out-shine what their contemporaries are able to do with the device.

It also shows just how far extremely talented programmers can push the graphics envelope on iPhone-class hardware far beyond what most people imagined was possible. If either company is willing to licence their engines to other developers with reasonable licensing terms, we could see an explosion of brilliant games for the iOS platform as developers no longer feel the need to write their own graphics engines from scratch and can instead spend their times writing the code and story lines to make their games unique.

I can’t wait to see where this goes.