I previously wrote about fragmentation of iOS games controllers, with the GameDock providing a different system from the somewhat popular iCade. Before that, I questioned the sanity in app-specific controllers, because it made no sense that someone would buy a controller for one game or set of games.

Duo had form in this, creating Atari Arcade, an Atari-branded controller specifically for the mediocre Atari’s Greatest Hits, which includes a bunch of arcade games that really only work with their original controllers that weren’t joystick-based. So Atari Arcade is not only more limited than the iCade, but a non-optimal experience with the only games it works with. Great.

Duo’s now announced Duo Gamer and Duo Pinball. Again, these appear to be specific to certain companies—the Gamer ” plays exclusively with top-rated Gameloft apps” and the Duo Pinball? Yup: “Duo Pinball works exclusively with the games from Gameprom listed on the website”. What’s most baffling about this isn’t that Duo has started from this position (iCade, remember, initially only worked with Atari’s compilation), but that the website FAQs appear to suggest it wishes to remain there:

I’m a developer; can I use the Duo Gamer for my game?
No, the Duo Gamer works exclusively with Gameloft games. If you’re interested in using a controller for your games please email controllerdev@discoverybaygames.com.

I’m a developer; can I use the Duo Pinball for my game?
No, the Duo Pinball works exclusively with Gameprom games. If you’re interested in using a controller for your games please email controllerdev@discoverybaygames.com.

So the aim appears to be “we will design a controller specifically for your games, rather than adding value to our existing products”. Perhaps I’m missing something, but this seems like a perfect way to send your hardware rapidly to the bargain bins, once people realise quite how limited it is. Still, perhaps the press will help out. After all, while not being thrilled with the Duo Pinball itself, Slide to Play said in its review:

Duo Pinball controller works with games from just one company, Gameprom, the makers of the best pinball games on the App Store

Well, I guess Pinball Arcade and Zen Pinball must be figments of my imagination. Lucky me.

Kotaku editor Stephen Totilo has published an interview with Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo. I’ve written quite a bit about Nintendo on this blog, and prior to the iPhone’s appearance, most of my gaming was on Nintendo handhelds. I particularly loved the DS, but I also own various Game Boys, and they all sit sadly unloved in a chest of drawers in my office.

Despite this, I’m not of the opinion Nintendo should throw in its lot with Apple and other third parties, effectively becoming another Sega—yet. This is because Nintendo still has the potential to out-Apple Apple in the gaming space, through making games and hardware. This, note, is what Apple proponents rightly say sets Apple apart from much of the competition—it makes devices and operating systems, and so can mesh those things together far better than other companies. But Apple doesn’t do this in gaming.

What Apple does do in gaming, however, is provide a number of lessons that I still believe Nintendo must learn from:

• More of an emphasis on digital downloads, with the immediacy and better value  those things can provide.
• A better way of dealing with indies—perhaps not quite a iOS-style free-for-all, but there must be a happy medium where bedroom coders are encouraged to bring further innovation to the platform.
• More linkage with the wider world, through the use of non-gaming apps. Again, Nintendo shouldn’t follow Apple in this regard—a Nintendo device doesn’t need a half-million apps. But it does need to keep the device in someone’s hands, so they don’t stray. So: stronger social, browsing and video apps are a must, for a start.

The main focus of a Nintendo device must remain games, but that shouldn’t be the only focus, otherwise Nintendo runs the risk of its devices becoming increasingly niche, which in itself is a danger in that such things will appeal to people with very specific demands. The success of Nintendo handhelds has often hinged on their accessible and widespread nature, not them only finding favour with the select few.

The Kotaku interview is interesting in that instead of being bullish—Nintendo’s tactic of the past—Iwata is seemingly very aware of the changes in the market and yet has a belief Nintendo can continue to succeed. Again, there’s evidence here from Apple’s history—when the products are good enough, the company has been massively profitable with a minority share. Nintendo therefore must ensure its products are good enough—’magical’, to use Apple’s rather naff terminology—and not merely OK.

One way of doing this is in creating unique experiences, argues Iwata:

I think that if we are able to provide experiences on handheld devices that consumers cannot get on another device, then we will continue creating software and hardware going forward…

Strong first-party games married with intuitive and preferably innovative control mechanisms are the way to do this. But Nintendo has of late too often wavered and retreated to its default position of “release the same hardware in different colours and at different sizes”, which leads to Iwata’s flip-side of the coin:

… and if it comes to a point when we’re not able to do that, I think, yeah, you will see portable handheld gaming devices go the way of the Dodo

Curiously, though, Iwata also isn’t blind to its rivals, nor seemingly scared by them, as the Kotaku piece notes:

The entirety of what you might need to know about how Satoru Iwata feels about the supposed threat of Apple and iOS gaming is that, during our interview last week, Iwata read 3DS sales figures to me off of a MacBook Air, which was plugged into a white iPhone, presumably his. When a gaming reporter goes to a showcase for, say, a Wii game or an Xbox game, Nintendo and Microsoft show their games on non-Sony TVs. They don’t let you see hardware from supposed rivals. But there was Iwata, sitting around the corner of a table from me, laptop flipped open, Apple icon presented toward me.

This to my mind shows a confidence in Nintendo’s products, and also an admission that other companies exist, and that their products are also worth using. Additionally, Totilo also got an interesting response from Iwata about the thorny issue of convergence:

[In] the day of the GBA our challenge was to provide experiences you could not have on a cellphone at that time. In the same way, we have to look at the Nintendo 3DS and other platforms in our future as being able to do the same thing in terms of what smartphones can provide as well.

However, Totilo makes a statement that’s almost a counterpoint and that rings very true:

[The interview] was eye-opening, because it did not conform with the critique from some quarters that Nintendo’s head is in the sand and that it does not appreciate the threat of cheap, downloadable iOS and Android games. But it was also short on specifics of how Nintendo would set itself apart in a world that seems more gaga over the next iPhone than over, say, the 3DS’ glass-free 3D.

This appears to be the challenge for Nintendo now: not in realising the market has changed, but responding to that. I’m going to be very interested to see what’s next from the company. Another DS with a gimmick is clearly not going to be enough. I wouldn’t be shocked to see the Game Boy brand back, but as a much stronger device in terms of being multifunctional, but also with innovations for gaming that no-one else had thought of. If not and we just get the 3DSMax-o-tron II, I think Nintendo could find itself in a much worse situation.

Still, even if the worst comes to the worst and Nintendo did have to do a Sega, imagine if its games ended up officially on iOS: Angry Birds would be ousted from the top of the charts by Mario and chums, probably forever. As a worse-case scenario, that’s not too bad a prospect, and you could bet even a gaming-ambivalent Apple would sit up and take notice if it got an email from Iwata mentioning that Nintendo’s games were soon coming to the iPhone and iPad.

Tap! magazine deputy editor Matthew Bolton has written about IAP in iOS gaming, complaining about its increased dominance and the way that many developers don’t know where to draw the line. He talks about two different approaches: ‘complete’ and ‘endless’. The former is where you have a finite amount of game, chop it into bits, with some of said bits being premium upgrades. Hero Academy is a good example on iOS—a game where you can happily play for free, but where you must pay to unlock alternative teams and cosmetic upgrades. The endless approach is the one I’ve complained about before, where you require an in-game resource that either demands constant payment or that possibly recharges in a glacial manner, sapping enjoyment and increasing frustration. Bolton cites the bafflingly highly regarded CSR Racing as an example of this kind of freemium title; depressingly, it also manages to kill the satire in my piece that I linked to, in actually demanding payment for petrol. In a racing game. I think the phrase rhymes with ‘clucking bell’.

Bolton says greed is the problem (and that’s certainly the case in games that would otherwise be pretty good, such as EA’s latest Tetris for iOS, ruined by the freemium system), and he wonders if freemium will cause iOS gaming to be held back in terms of creativity:

If it looks like invasive IAPs are the only way to be successful, will brilliant games that don’t fit that model end up going elsewhere? When games are being created with the Endless model in mind, do traditional game mechanics, such as progression, fall by the wayside? I played No Zombies Allowed for a while, but gave up after a few days, because all I was earning was more of what I already had. I was accumulating, but for what? The game didn’t escalate. I was just building and building. What if all devs interested in offering a game with an actual pay-off abandon iOS for Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft platforms? That would be a huge regression for iOS gamers.

Those of you with long memories will argue we’ve been here before. In the early 1980s, arcade games were designed with a fixed chunk of time in mind for your 10p or your quarter, but if you got good—really good—you could sit on an arcade cab for hours. Those were the finite games of their day, and they were about challenging gamers to beat them. After the gaming crash in 1984, and with the realisation that almost every arcade game was selling fewer cabs than its predecessor, cynical business models took over. Games no longer gave you three lives and a stern challenge: instead, they eventually got to the point where they were totally impossible to beat, but they’d give you that wonderful option of the continue. “Feed me more money,” they’d say, a glint in their eye, “and you can carry on from where you just left off. Your time won’t have been wasted! Go on! You know you want to.”

To my mind, far too many iOS freemium games are now the ‘continue’ of modern gaming. They are designed around keeping you hooked through the time investment you’ve put into them, rather than around addictive, exciting, engaging game design. The problem is, money talks, and with top-grossing titles typically being the most exploitative money-gouging games on the App Store, why wouldn’t more developers head in that direction? My hope is that something—anything—will make them change course, or at least leave enough of the really great developers playing a fairer game, because otherwise the greatest platform since the dawn of home gaming will end up bloated and dying on the floor, surrounded by mouldy piles of pointless Smurf berries and tarnished ‘coins’, which are only accepted currency for a stupid pixelated hat or a hateful paid-for fuel top-up for a virtual car.

Although it at the time of writing only has 260 backers, the GameDock for iPhone, iPad and iPod is over 80 per cent of the way to funding its Kickstarter project. As hard as I try, I just don’t get the point of the device. I last year wrote about iOS controllers, which at the time were fragmenting wildly. Today, the majority of controllers are iCade compatible, and yet the devices I’ve tested still exhibit massive fragmentation, largely due to the manner in which buttons are mapped.

Much of the reason for this is down to the original iCade’s set-up: a joystick and eight action buttons. Developers made their own decisions regarding which buttons mapped to which controls. You therefore find some games work with the left-most buttons and some with the right-most ones. For the original iCade and iCade Core, this doesn’t matter a great deal. The worst-case scenario is one rapidly aborted game with your on-screen guy getting killed as you figure out which buttons equate to jump and fire. iCade-compatible mobile devices, such as the iCade Mobile and Gametel aren’t nearly so lucky. With only four action buttons, many games become unplayable, substantially reducing the already smallish compatible selection. (Games aren’t automatically compatible with iCade—developers must specifically add support.)

The GameDock further reduces the number of action buttons to two, and so it’ll be a small miracle if many games work well with it. Additionally, the controllers are clearly modelled on NES controllers, which is a pretty good way to get sued by Nintendo, and the entire system is based around wires. You plug a wire from the GameDock into the TV, for video output, and the controllers plug into the dock itself. This might be kitsch and retro, but it also feels like a step back. To my mind, the future for iOS and gaming remains AirPlay and the Apple TV. It’s still not there yet—it’s too common to get just enough lag for games to feel wrong—but it makes more sense to me to use this system than one so solidly rooted in the 1980s.

Back in May, I wrote a quickfire review of sorts of the iCADE, a little arcade cabinet for the iPad. Around the same time, I also turned down two commissions to review the hardware for British magazines, primarily because I believed at the time that the hardware wasn’t reviewable in the traditional sense—the lack of support by third parties meant it was impossible to rate. The hardware was solid, but the only game at the time you could use with it was the mediocre Atari’s Greatest Hits; making that car crash about 20 per cent better certainly wasn’t worth a 75 quid investment, and yet it seemed wrong to massively downrate great new hardware due to poor support.

iCADE support has since grown, albeit slowly. But it was interesting that when I recently interviewed a bunch of major publishers involved in retro-gaming, they remained utterly tight-lipped about iCADE plans. To my mind, it would make perfect sense for Taito, Namco, Capcom and others to support the hardware, but what we’ve instead seen is a handful of indie developers quietly adding iCADE support to their apps. I no longer have an iCADE to hand, but I imagine that mini cabinet with Mos Speedrun or Minotron is probably a great pairing.

What’s most curious, however, is the lack of support from majors might be down to them working on their own systems. TouchArcade last week reported on Atari’s own stick, which strikes me as an odd idea—it’s portrait only (many of Atari’s games aren’t, nor are many of the apps that support iCADE), and a good chunk of the games in Atari’s compilation weren’t originally designed for joystick control, which is part of the reason they never really clicked for me with the iCADE. And earlier today, developer Stuart Carnie linked through to the iNVADERCADE, which looks like a tiny arcade cabinet for playing Taito’s rather poor iPad version of Space Invaders (which scales up the iPhone release in a lazy manner). It’s unclear from the video on the site whether other games will be supported, but even so, as developer Paul Pridham asked:

Is the iPad controller market that lucrative?

I doubt it is, and I very much agree with Carnie’s reply:

I would think one general purpose controller would be ideal. There is no standard SDK by Apple = fragmentation

I’m not really convinced at all by the need for physical controls for iOS games, because the best developers have gotten past that limitation, but I can see there’s a certain niche appeal regarding a ‘traditional’ controller, especially one as cute as the iCADE. What I don’t understand is individual developers releasing ones for their own games, fragmenting an already tiny market, rather than seeking to support a product that already exists and is already generally liked by those who’ve used it. I’d quite like an iCADE, especially if more games supported it; but the last thing I need on my desk is a little row of iPad games controllers, each one only working with a tiny number of titles.