Bring out your dead – it’s time again to make predictions that certain elements of the games industry are not long for this world. Only, don’t, because it’s tedious and demonstrably untrue. What’s got my grapes in a press?
The arrival of the iPhone 4s, that's what. I don't have a problem with the upgrade - I think the 4s with its clever Siri voice recognition tech, is a great upgrade over the previous model. It's more the reaction to the iPhone 4s's claimed seven fold increase in graphical power over the already beefy iPhone 4, that's got me grumbling.
On the back of the iPhone 4s release (not to mention the high-spec Galaxy Nexus smartphone, also unveiled this week), a session of doom-mongering has emerged from the mobile games development scene. Apparently, these super-powered smartphones with their increasingly meaty hardware and operating systems will ultimately result in consoles and indie mobile developers being taken out behind the woodshed and given a hot lead injection directly to the brain.
The argument goes a little something like this. The mobile hardware trajectory is fast – far faster than the console hardware trajectory. Nobody could argue with that – mobile phones are typically given a mighty specs bump every year at least, while consoles tend to wait 5-10 years to get their innards refreshed. With mobile hardware beefing up its native processing power so quickly, there are many who believe that it’s an untenable situation for developers long-term, especially indies, as the tools and expertise needed to milk the most from the rapidly advancing hardware would need to be updated much more quickly than they are currently.
This would extend mobile development cycles while developers got to grips with new tech and tools, making it very tough for the little guy to keep up and increasingly expensive for even seasoned, larger development teams to push around the most dazzling arrangement of pixels possible. In essence, the hardware performance bottleneck would be opened up and the development performance bottleneck would get narrower.
Continued on the next pageMaking the morning rounds.
• Cougar Town. The Big East has reportedly made BYU a priority in its ongoing expansion push and could announce the Cougars' arrival as part of a new Western Division by the end of the week. Invitations went out earlier this month to six other schools — Air Force, Boise State and Navy in football and Central Florida, Houston and SMU in all sports — in a cross-continental effort to shore up the ranks after flagship members Pittsburgh and Syracuse bolted for the ACC and West Virginia made tracks for the Big 12.
If it comes through, BYU's addition would put the new-look Big East at an even dozen teams, give Boise State a logical new rival in the Rockies and likely keep the league's embattled BCS status intact. Best of all, there's no jilted conference to haggle with over the Cougars' exit. [Salt Lake Tribune, Associated Press]
• Will he or won't he, part one. It may be a bit of sand-bagging before one of the biggest games of the year, but USC coach Lane Kiffin insisted Wednesday that ace receiver Robert Woods may be too banged up to play this weekend at Oregon. "He's going the wrong direction. He's not getting better," Kiffin said, pointing to ankle and shoulder injuries that held Woods out of Wednesday's practice. "Watch him yesterday. We've got service-team corners that he can't run by right now. He's just worn down."
Chip Kelly's response? "He's playing, I'll tell you that right now. I love that kid, he's a competitor. He's playing." [Orange County Register, Eugene Register Guard]
• Will he or won't he, part two. (Spoiler: He won't.) There seem to be no such doubts about the status of Arkansas tailback Knile Davis, according to coach Bobby Petrino, who quickly shot down reports that Davis was close to returning from a broken ankle. "He has been out at practice now for about three weeks running around, doing some individual (drills), doing a little bit of our run game, but he's not in a position where he can play," Petrino said on a weekly teleconference for SEC coaches. "He still has to have some hardware taken out of his ankle." [Arkansas Democrat-Gazette]
• The Rap Sheet. Vanderbilt has suspended safety Andre Simmons, 19, who was hit with two felony charges for allegedly robbing a member of the school's club ice hockey team at gunpoint. According to an affidavit, Simmons and another man — one of them armed with a handgun — entered a dorm room earlier this week, took $5,000 from a safe and struck the hockey player in the head with the gun. After one suspect fled with the money, Simmons was chased into a parking garage, where he was taken into custody. He's charged with felony burglary and robbery and was being held Wednesday on $100,000 bond. [The Tennessean]
• We'll be seeing you when we see you. Due to the "complexities" of its nine-game conference schedule, the Pac-12 may be forced to move some of its traditional rivalry games — Cal/Stanford, Arizona/Arizona State, Oregon/Oregon State, Washington/Washington State, USC/UCLA — from the end of the schedule to some point earlier in the season. One reason is that some schools are reluctant to play rivalry games on Thanksgiving weekend, but as usual, the biggest culprit is a certain four-letter network: The increase in Thursday night games forces participants to take the preceding weekend off.
"We can't commit to having the rivalry games stay on Thanksgiving week or the weekend before Thanksgiving," said deputy commissioner Kevin Weiberg. "It doesn't all fit together in a neat and tidy package, so that all the rivalries can be slotted in the final two weeks. Our preference is to keep them as (late) as we can. But it's very likely that at least one will have to move up." [San Jose Mercury News]
• Fiesta felonies. Natalie Wisneski, the former chief operating officer of the Fiesta Bowl was indicted on federal charges Tuesday for her role in the scandal that forced out the bowl's CEO and drew a $1 million fine from the BCS earlier this year. She faces nine counts, including:
• Soliciting illegal campaign contributions from Fiesta Bowl employees, and arranging to reimburse them;
• Making campaign contributions in the name of another;
• Filing false tax returns, which allegedly failed to report any of the bowl's $1.5 million in lobbying and political expenditures over the last decade;
• Causing false statements to be made to the Federal Election Commission;
• Conspiracy.
The investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office is ongoing, as are probes by the Arizona Attorney General's Office and the Maricopa County Attorney's Office, which is investigating 28 legislators and four other elected officials who accepted gifts from the bowl. Wisneski, the bowl's second-in-command, made $391,824 in fiscal 2010. From a nonprofit. [Arizona Republic]
Quickly… Penn State names a former player (and current trustee) as its new acting athletic director. … The Big 12 reprimands coach and player alike for complaining about a facemask call against Kansas. … Tennessee fans have had a lot of time to assess both of the Vols' punters. … Demar Dorsey is still aiming for Michigan. .. De'Anthony Thomas' decision to snub USC may have come down to an assistant coach, or simply to the fact that he felt more comfortable at Oregon. … And Mack Brown may have the highest salary, but Dennis Erickson has the best incentives.
- - -
Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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Bring out your dead – it’s time again to make predictions that certain elements of the games industry are not long for this world. Only, don’t, because it’s tedious and demonstrably untrue. What’s got my grapes in a press?
The arrival of the iPhone 4s, that's what. I don't have a problem with the upgrade - I think the 4s with its clever Siri voice recognition tech, is a great upgrade over the previous model. It's more the reaction to the iPhone 4s's claimed seven fold increase in graphical power over the already beefy iPhone 4, that's got me grumbling.
On the back of the iPhone 4s release (not to mention the high-spec Galaxy Nexus smartphone, also unveiled this week), a session of doom-mongering has emerged from the mobile games development scene. Apparently, these super-powered smartphones with their increasingly meaty hardware and operating systems will ultimately result in consoles and indie mobile developers being taken out behind the woodshed and given a hot lead injection directly to the brain.
The argument goes a little something like this. The mobile hardware trajectory is fast – far faster than the console hardware trajectory. Nobody could argue with that – mobile phones are typically given a mighty specs bump every year at least, while consoles tend to wait 5-10 years to get their innards refreshed. With mobile hardware beefing up its native processing power so quickly, there are many who believe that it’s an untenable situation for developers long-term, especially indies, as the tools and expertise needed to milk the most from the rapidly advancing hardware would need to be updated much more quickly than they are currently.
This would extend mobile development cycles while developers got to grips with new tech and tools, making it very tough for the little guy to keep up and increasingly expensive for even seasoned, larger development teams to push around the most dazzling arrangement of pixels possible. In essence, the hardware performance bottleneck would be opened up and the development performance bottleneck would get narrower.
Continued on the next pageMaking the morning rounds.
• Cougar Town. The Big East has reportedly made BYU a priority in its ongoing expansion push and could announce the Cougars' arrival as part of a new Western Division by the end of the week. Invitations went out earlier this month to six other schools — Air Force, Boise State and Navy in football and Central Florida, Houston and SMU in all sports — in a cross-continental effort to shore up the ranks after flagship members Pittsburgh and Syracuse bolted for the ACC and West Virginia made tracks for the Big 12.
If it comes through, BYU's addition would put the new-look Big East at an even dozen teams, give Boise State a logical new rival in the Rockies and likely keep the league's embattled BCS status intact. Best of all, there's no jilted conference to haggle with over the Cougars' exit. [Salt Lake Tribune, Associated Press]
• Will he or won't he, part one. It may be a bit of sand-bagging before one of the biggest games of the year, but USC coach Lane Kiffin insisted Wednesday that ace receiver Robert Woods may be too banged up to play this weekend at Oregon. "He's going the wrong direction. He's not getting better," Kiffin said, pointing to ankle and shoulder injuries that held Woods out of Wednesday's practice. "Watch him yesterday. We've got service-team corners that he can't run by right now. He's just worn down."
Chip Kelly's response? "He's playing, I'll tell you that right now. I love that kid, he's a competitor. He's playing." [Orange County Register, Eugene Register Guard]
• Will he or won't he, part two. (Spoiler: He won't.) There seem to be no such doubts about the status of Arkansas tailback Knile Davis, according to coach Bobby Petrino, who quickly shot down reports that Davis was close to returning from a broken ankle. "He has been out at practice now for about three weeks running around, doing some individual (drills), doing a little bit of our run game, but he's not in a position where he can play," Petrino said on a weekly teleconference for SEC coaches. "He still has to have some hardware taken out of his ankle." [Arkansas Democrat-Gazette]
• The Rap Sheet. Vanderbilt has suspended safety Andre Simmons, 19, who was hit with two felony charges for allegedly robbing a member of the school's club ice hockey team at gunpoint. According to an affidavit, Simmons and another man — one of them armed with a handgun — entered a dorm room earlier this week, took $5,000 from a safe and struck the hockey player in the head with the gun. After one suspect fled with the money, Simmons was chased into a parking garage, where he was taken into custody. He's charged with felony burglary and robbery and was being held Wednesday on $100,000 bond. [The Tennessean]
• We'll be seeing you when we see you. Due to the "complexities" of its nine-game conference schedule, the Pac-12 may be forced to move some of its traditional rivalry games — Cal/Stanford, Arizona/Arizona State, Oregon/Oregon State, Washington/Washington State, USC/UCLA — from the end of the schedule to some point earlier in the season. One reason is that some schools are reluctant to play rivalry games on Thanksgiving weekend, but as usual, the biggest culprit is a certain four-letter network: The increase in Thursday night games forces participants to take the preceding weekend off.
"We can't commit to having the rivalry games stay on Thanksgiving week or the weekend before Thanksgiving," said deputy commissioner Kevin Weiberg. "It doesn't all fit together in a neat and tidy package, so that all the rivalries can be slotted in the final two weeks. Our preference is to keep them as (late) as we can. But it's very likely that at least one will have to move up." [San Jose Mercury News]
• Fiesta felonies. Natalie Wisneski, the former chief operating officer of the Fiesta Bowl was indicted on federal charges Tuesday for her role in the scandal that forced out the bowl's CEO and drew a $1 million fine from the BCS earlier this year. She faces nine counts, including:
• Soliciting illegal campaign contributions from Fiesta Bowl employees, and arranging to reimburse them;
• Making campaign contributions in the name of another;
• Filing false tax returns, which allegedly failed to report any of the bowl's $1.5 million in lobbying and political expenditures over the last decade;
• Causing false statements to be made to the Federal Election Commission;
• Conspiracy.
The investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office is ongoing, as are probes by the Arizona Attorney General's Office and the Maricopa County Attorney's Office, which is investigating 28 legislators and four other elected officials who accepted gifts from the bowl. Wisneski, the bowl's second-in-command, made $391,824 in fiscal 2010. From a nonprofit. [Arizona Republic]
Quickly… Penn State names a former player (and current trustee) as its new acting athletic director. … The Big 12 reprimands coach and player alike for complaining about a facemask call against Kansas. … Tennessee fans have had a lot of time to assess both of the Vols' punters. … Demar Dorsey is still aiming for Michigan. .. De'Anthony Thomas' decision to snub USC may have come down to an assistant coach, or simply to the fact that he felt more comfortable at Oregon. … And Mack Brown may have the highest salary, but Dennis Erickson has the best incentives.
- - -
Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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