Slide to Play reviews the PlayStation Vita:

The battery lasts about four hours, which isn’t great.

[The] overall interface is cluttered and somewhat unintuitive.

The touchscreen also feels occasionally unresponsive on both the home screen and in games.

The main cameras are definitely not up to par with the quality of the iPhone’s

The Vita is also rather bulky—especially next to an iPhone

It’s like a shopping list of ‘gnh’, and it feels as if Sony’s living in a little bubble where Apple and Android devices don’t exist, and where no-one’s switching to iOS and Android devices for all-in-one entertainment. Note that the review shows Vita does have some good points—it’s powerful, has a great screen, provides some innovation in the form of a rear touch panel, offers GPS, Wi-Fi, 3G and Bluetooth, has cloud sync for progress, and you can also control a PS3 with the handheld; but this next bit makes me slam my head into the desk with such force that it breaks in half and the sides fly up and hit me in the ears:

Probably the biggest complaint is Sony’s insistence on using a new and completely proprietary memory card format. The 16 GB card is about $60 and the 32 GB is $100, and unlike the standard Micro SD card that virtually every other device uses, these tiny cards are only for the Vita.

Really, Sony? Really? Did you not learn your lesson with UMD? Good grief. Still, at least the system is, according to Slide to Play, “very focused on online commerce thanks to Sony’s beefy online store”. Although whether people will be happy paying out for “$10–$50 Vita games” when iOS and Android equivalents are a fraction of that remains to be seen.

I suspect a core number of gamers will inevitably flock to the Vita, but I do wonder if the day of the dedicated gaming handheld is coming to a close. Even with Sony’s admission that apps beyond games are necessary on its console, adults and children alike enjoy the scope more ambitious devices bring them. It wouldn’t shock me to see a situation in a few years where PlayStation becomes a brand on Android devices and Nintendo becomes a Mario-flavoured version of Sega, releasing games for a range of devices that it didn’t create itself.

Late last year, I wrote about the increasingly absurd nature of IAP (in-app purchase) on iOS. The subject was Hipstamatic Disposable, which offered a bizarre pricing model that made you buy new and shiny virtual digital film for your new and shiny virtual digital film camera. I joked that we’d soon see driving games were you had to fill up your car with fuel, matching prices to the real world, just to enhance the realism. Several devs responded on Twitter, with at least some degree of seriousness, that I shouldn’t be giving certain publishers ideas.

The thing is, I’m not against IAP entirely, since it can be used for good. For example, it’s a great way to offer new content, or a ‘demo’ of a game that can be unlocked once you complete a few levels; it’s also a means to enable gamers to skip ahead through buying extras (i.e. cheats), which is fair enough if your difficulty curve is well-defined. The problem is that too many companies are now using IAP to gouge customers; they look at the top-grossing charts and see grind games performing well and therefore implement grind-or-pay mechanisms of their own. The vicious cycle continues, even infecting classic games like Tetris.

If you’ve not yet played it, the new Tetris for iPhone and iPod has the most astonishingly bat-shit crazy IAP possible. The sad thing is the game itself is, in my opinion, really good. You get a standard sub-optimal swipe mode, but also a new one-touch version that retains the game’s strategy but works well with the touchscreen. Additionally, there’s a compelling level-based puzzle mode that has you blast your way to the bottom of piles of junk. I’ve not had so much fun with a Tetris game since the version released for the original Game Boy.

But EA had to weld IAP to the game and ruin things. The puzzle mode has power-ups and these are paid for using T-Coins. You can either get T-Coins by grinding away scoring in the main mode, or by paying cold, hard cash. 200,000 T-Coins? A snip at $99.99! That’s a $99.99 IAP. For Tetris. Or you could ‘just’ pay $29.99 for a 12-month T-Club subscription, which earns you 15 per cent more T-Coins with every game! That’s right: for just 43 times more than the game itself costs, you can get a slight speed bump to how fast you acquire coins to spend elsewhere in the game. Of course, you don’t have to pay, but without doing so, you’re effectively screwed in the puzzle mode when it comes to decent scores and ratings (which is essentially what any iOS puzzler is about).

This is hateful, but it’s becoming all too common in the iOS gaming world. We now see freemium sports games that demand you pay for more ‘energy’ that is otherwise replenished at a painfully slow rate. And similar mechanics are evident in other genres, too. To my mind, this is the greatest threat to iOS gaming, which could become known not for great games, but for the fact it costs tens of dollars to buy yourself a right to play a bit of a game, but only for a set (and short) period of time, regardless of your level of skill and investment to that point.

I’m really not sure what the solution is. I’d started off thinking about 1980s arcades, which rewarded skill, in the sense that you still paid per play, but the better you got, the longer you stayed on the machine. The thing is, such ‘hardcore’ mechanics would alienate many contemporary gamers, who don’t expect to be booted off a game for not having perfect reflexes. But ‘pay for a slice of time’ in a more general sense feels even more like a corruption of gaming’s purity. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times and of my age. Music continues a move towards a subscription model, with you paying monthly for as much music as you can take in, rather than owning a more limited number of albums forever; television and movies, too, increasingly drift towards such models. But I still fear for gaming when instead of you paying a sum of money upfront for a finite slice of entertainment, you’re instead presented with absurd difficulty curves or arbitrary limitations that can only be overcome by delving into your wallet. And even then, you’ll be expected to delve at regular intervals.

I hope this is just a blip. I hope that the efforts of indies such as Zach Gage and Jeff Minter, both of which offer fantastic iOS games for set prices, encourage other developers to take this path, rather than gouging. But every month I see more developers dipping a toe into the freemium waters, under the guise of ‘social gaming’ or ‘value’, when what they’re really doing is hoping our wallets will chunder coin vomits into their banking toilets.

I last week wrote about Atari and Zynga showcasing imbalance in the iOS games industry. The main thrust of the argument was that in cases of a developer being inspired by an existing product, they were leaving themselves open to attack if small, but would be unaffected by the opposition (bar, possibly, some negative PR) if big. The two examples were:

• Atari forcing Vector Tanks games off of the App Store, due to the indie games borrowing fairly heavily from Atari’s Battlezone.
• Zynga’s Dream Heights looking perilously close to indie dev NimbleBit’s Tiny Towers.

GamesBeat now has a response from Zynga CEO Mark Pincus about the second of those spats:

We think there is a massive body of work in the video game industry that is going to be reimagined for decades to come in a way that is free, accessible and social. That’s what we’re doing. I don’t think anyone should be surprised when they see us come out with games that they’ve seen before, a decade or more ago. I don’t think there are a lot of totally new games that are invented. We always try. But to us, they are like the crew mechanic in our games. They give you a new way to interact with your friends.

To be fair to Pincus, I don’t have a problem with this argument. Even many of the games you think were amazingly original when they appeared at the dawn of the industry were effectively clones, or at least based heavily on existing games. Defender? Space Invaders, flipped on its side, with scrolling and a dash of Asteroids—and that’s a compressed version of the description I got directly from the game’s creator during a phone interview for Retro Gamer, not my own take on things.

However, what Pincus doesn’t address (and nor would I expect him to) is that this approach is only fine today if you are a company like Zynga, backed by an army of lawyers and a pile of cash. He’s essentially using the same excuse as the Vector Tanks devs—that it’s fine to take an existing gaming idea and put your own spin on it to add further value. But it isn’t nearly a level playing field, and indies are the ones hit by the fallout, whether they’re the ones providing inspiration (and cannot afford to battle huge companies inspired by their games) or drawing from existing gaming properties (and cannot afford to defend when a large company has their game removed from sale).

Hat-tip: The Appside.

Further reading: NimbleBit responds on TouchArcade regarding just how close Tiny Towers and Dream Heights are—clearly in the same ballpark as Battlezone and the original Vector Tanks.

Engadget reports on Nintendo’s rather poor quarter:

The company posted profits of ¥40.9 billion (about $631.6 million) for the October – December period, representing a 61 percent quarterly drop. That’s especially disappointing, considering that this period has traditionally been strong for Nintendo, which had previously forecast an operating profit of ¥1 billion (around $12.9 million). Those forecasts have since changed, however, with the manufacturer now predicting a ¥45 billion ($580 million) operating loss for the full year, ending March 31st. Nintendo blames the poor showing to sagging 3DS sales, which have forced it to slash prices.

Despite my gaming now almost entirely being on iOS, and my belief that iOS has heavily impacted on Nintendo (through people gaming on smartphones and iPods, and through parents buying children iOS devices over Nintendo handhelds with expensive, easy-to-lose cartridges), I was fairly positive about the company a year ago:

It remains to be seen if the 3DS sales slump is a temporary glitch, and even if the console isn’t a massive hit, that certainly doesn’t mean Nintendo is in any way doomed. Like Apple, it’s managed to be profitable at almost every point during its history, even when one of its consoles only had a minority share of the market. But Nintendo could for the first time find itself ousted as the default company synonymous with handheld gaming—and that would be a pretty major shake-up for the entire industry.

I still think Nintendo is probably the company most people think of as synonymous with handheld gaming; the thing is, that’s clearly no longer enough for it to remain profitable. And since that was Nintendo’s trump card—an Apple-like profitability regardless of its market position, that is a major concern for the company.

When the 3DS appeared, I didn’t think it was enough. It felt like a relic, with a gimmick—an echo of a bygone age, where dedicated handheld gaming devices still mattered. It continued Nintendo’s line of thinking that had worked so well since the original Game Boy: technologically middling but accessible and portable hardware; reliance on high-quality first-party IP that’s drip-fed over many months to an eager audience; software sold on expensive cartridges; an honest focus on the purity of gaming; a level of accessibility that the likes of Sony can only dream of.

These ideals were once precisely what the industry needed, but now Nintendo has to face the harsh reality that it’s veering dangerously close to becoming another Sega. If it cannot halt the decline with the Wii U, whatever it brings out next in the handheld space (and I’ll be surprised if the DS brand isn’t retired, enabling the Game Boy to—potentially—triumphantly return) will have to be nothing short of amazing—a device that will wrench people away from smartphones and iPods, back to Nintendo. But if Nintendo continues to stubbornly follow the same path, will that be enough? It wasn’t for the 3DS. So will the company bite the bullet and go with the flow, with a system that works with cheaper downloads rather than expensive cartridges, and that at the very least recognises some manner of an app ecosystem (with stronger options regarding web browsing, social networking, reading, movies, music, and so on)?

I hope so. Despite what raging Nintendo fan-boys think whenever I criticise the company (my record to date: a drop of 50 Twitter followers from one short string of comments some months back), I do not want Nintendo to fail. Although over-reliant on refreshing certain aspects of its catalogue a little too often, it’s also been a company of innovation. The original DS was a brave move, as was the Wii. Both made gaming more accessible and open, wrenching it from the claw-like grips of so-called ‘hardcore’ gamers. For a long time, I considered Nintendo the Apple of gaming—a company that cared about the details and about the right things (fun, excitement, enjoyment). Nintendo’s problem these days is that Apple is now the Apple of gaming—and the Japanese veteran needs to fight back, perhaps borrowing some of the tricks used by the plucky American upstart.

Late last year, it was revealed that Vector Tanks and Vector Tanks Extreme had been pulled from the App Store. The games were reasonably close tributes to Atari’s classic arcade game Battlezone, but did not use the original game’s IP. Ed Rotberg, creator of Battlezone, told me during an interview that he was impressed by Vector Tanks; Atari, unsurprisingly, was less so, and has of late gone on something of a rampage of destruction on the App Store, taking down as many apps that resemble its properties as possible.

After days of silence, Atari issued a statement to Joystiq:

For companies like Atari, our intellectual property portfolio is our most valued asset. While we have great respect for the indie developer community and greatly appreciate the enthusiasm that they have for our renowned properties, we need to vigorously protect our intellectual property and ensure that it is represented in highly innovative games. We have been actively engaging with numerous established and up and coming developers to help us re-imagine our iconic franchises, and outside app developers have already helped us produce two top 10 mobile game successes in Asteroids: Gunner and Breakout: Boost. We look forward to further developing strong relationships with the indie app development community through additional games that we will be releasing in the future.

Responses to Atari’s actions varied. Some argued it was unfairly throwing its weight around; others, such as Jared Newman at Technologizer, argued that Atari was perfectly within its rights, since Vector Tanks

rips off plenty of the Battlezone aesthetic, including the green wireframe tanks, the square- and triangle-shaped obstacles, and the wireframe mountains in the distance set against a black backdrop.

And while Vector Tanks Extreme adds more features,

it’s built on the same cloned foundation.

I find the case more troubling. There’s no doubt Vector Tanks was heavily inspired by Battlezone, but if that’s an argument, Atari needs to realise that the vast majority of its own IP was based heavily on other properties, too, judging by interviews I’ve done with the developers of many of its classic games. Very few games were truly original, even in the early 1980s. And even in today’s litigious society, surely Atari could have taken a smarter route. It talks about outside developers helping to produce updates of old Atari games, so why not just rebrand Vector Tanks as an iOS Battlezone series? Instead of killing the games, bring them sort-of in-house. That way, everyone’s happy.

Today, however, we see the Atari/Vector Tanks situation in reverse. Zynga has released Dream Heights, a game that appears perilously close to indie hit Tiny Towers by NimbleBit. Curiously, one NimbleBit developer said on Twitter that Zynga

did go the honest route and try to acquire us first.

The developer has since written a snarky open letter to Zynga, starkly highlighting the similarities between the games, and noting the difference in size between Zynga (2789 employees) and NimbleBit (three). What links this to the Vector Tanks spat is there’s as much Tiny Tower in Dream Heights as Battlezone in Vector Tanks, but I wonder what would happen if NimbleBit issued a similar take-down request to Apple. Would Apple comply? Possibly. But would the long-term results be the same? My guess: not at all. Zynga would simply unleash its legal team and NimbleBit would have no way to fight back.

This is the imbalance in the App Store. The same legal issues ultimately exist for the Vector Tanks developer, too. There is legal precedent that videogame mechanics are barely possible to protect—only direct IP (trademarks and so on) are; however, the small developer has no chance in fighting the big guns, regardless of whether it’s the one being inspired or the one providing the inspiration. On a gaming ecosystem that’s done more to level the playing field than any other since the days of 8-bit computers, this is a huge pity. Here’s hoping that Tiny Tower being first to market enables it to continue being a success, and that the Vector Tanks developers continue to produce great games that don’t resemble Atari’s IP enough for them to be the target of legal smackdowns.