As many of you may know, Rockstar has recently been showing Grand Theft Auto III on touch screen devices, including tablets. The game is scheduled to be released on tablets and smartphones on Dec. 15 and you can view some screenshots in TouchArcade’s report. Many of you may also know that Infinity Blade II hit the iPad and iPad 2 recently. Infinity Blade II has been getting an amazing reception and some say it is pushing tablet gaming forward.
TabTimes has recently featured an interview with one of the people responsible for Infinity Blade II’s development and release. The interview is interesting for any tablet owner because it deals with gaming on not just the game, or the iPad, but tablets as a whole.
The interviewee is none other than Donald Mustard, who is the creative director and co-founder of Chair Entertainment. He seems to be very optimistic in the future of gaming on tablets as a whole.
He said that although tablets are behind consoles in terms of graphics, they are advancing at an incredible rate and will catch up in the distant future. He even said tablets exceed consoles in some areas.
According to Mustard, “things are accelerating quickly, and I would expect within the next few years that the tablets will reach the power of current consoles… tablets typically have even more memory than consoles and that will continue to become even more of a reality as the they get even faster and have more dedicated memory inside of them that we can use.”
One of the reasons that games on tablets seem shorter so far, he pointed out, is due to the nature of the platform and development cycles. He said that Chair had a lot less people working on Infinity Blade II than when the company created titles like Gears of War III. Part of this was attributed to the fact tablet users attention spans are shorter and they sit less in front of devices in pure gaming sessions. Another part, he alluded to, deals with budget constraints and the amount of money console games can make compared to tablet games. Just compare app store prices to how much retail or even brand new Steam games cost.
According to Mustard, “We have about a dozen people working on Infinity Blade, and we do it in less time, six months. Let’s say Gears of War is 68 or 70 people for three years, and Infinity Blade is 12 to 16 people for six months—it just greatly reduces the cost that way.”
He did point out that he foresees tablet games growing, the budgets companies put into them expanding, and prices possibly being raised for consumers.
It is definitely a great time for tablet owners who are also gamers. With big developers like Chair, Rockstar, and even Activision supporting the platform who knows what titles will dome out next.
