Nvidia’s VP of mobile content Neil Trevett gave a speech at the Mobile Games Forum conference this morning, looking at the future evolution of hardware.
“By 2015 it’s forecast that there will be 2bn console-class gaming units shipping every year,” he said – a figure that includes smartphones, tablets, netbooks, notebooks and desktops.
Trevett also hailed the rapid growth of tablets, spearheaded by Apple’s iPad. “Apple is fabulously successful and I’m sure will continue to be so, but I do think Android will, over time, really dominate the mobile market,” he said.
“It’s nothing to do with who’s better, it’s just you have thousands of companies producing these devices… I think it’s going to be a repeat of the PC/Mac market, with 80% Android and 20% iOS.”
Nvidia’s big bet for now is its Tegra 3 quad-core 1.4GHz chipset, which is shipping to manufacturers today, with Asus’ Eee Pad Transformer Prime tablet one of the first to use it, alongside the same company’s MeMO 370T model, which was announced at the CES show in January, and will cost $249 in the US.
“This is the next wave in seeing the momentum behind Android investment allowing a lot of people to have tablets out there, not just high-end iPads,” said Trevett, before moving on to the implications for mobile and tablet games that make use of these processors.
“We are really at the point where we can do console-class games on these devices,” he said, citing Android game Riptide GP as a prime example, and adding that there is an increasing trend for people to connect their tablets to larger HD TVs, and even to use wireless controllers rather than just the touchscreen and accelerometer.
Trevett talked about Nvidia’s roadmap for the coming years, with processors codenamed Wayne (2012), Logan (2013) and Stark (2014) to follow Tegra 3. “This is actually faster than Moore’s Law,” he said, of the growth in capabilities of these processors.
“Are we just going to see the high end of mobile gaming being repurposed console type games? I don’t think so. I think the processing capability and the sensors and the cameras and the mobility that we find in these devices will enable and inspire new genres of games,” said Trevett.
That said, there are some console parallels: he suggested that cameras in tablets and smartphones will bring Kinect-style gestural interfaces to mobile games. And Trevett also described augmented reality as “a lighthouse use case… currently it’s a zero-billion-dollar industry, we haven’t quite found the killer app yet… but it will find an outlet sooner or later.”
Trevett talked about the work going on around standards for the way developers and their apps/games can access the various sensors in mobile devices, and get them to work together. This is all going on under the auspices of industry body The Khronos Group.
He finished off by talking about native apps versus HTML5 web apps. “I’m a big believer in HTML5 being a portable coding platform,” said Trevett, before citing Apple’s refusal to allow Flash onto its iOS platform as a sign of resistance to any technology that makes cross-platform app development easier.
“Very often the OS vendors are quite hostile to that sort of initiative… HTML5 is the one trapdoor that has been left open,” he added, before admitting that currently, people like native apps because they tend to be richer.
“If we use the GPU properly in HTML5 we can have exactly that same level of interaction and beauty,” said Trevett, predicting that we’ll be seeing “console-class game titles” running in smartphone and tablet browsers in the next few years.
What’s the potential for games like Angry Birds? “I’ve talked to Rovio, and there’s going to be versions…” he said, before checking. “I should be careful! Angry Birds can do a lot more… Once you give them the power, they can start doing particle effects in the volcanoes… They can use a 3D physics engine… Even the classic 2D title like Angry Birds with the right imagination will be able to take advantage of the processing power.”
But he clarified. “Processing power doesn’t get rid of the need for great game design.” Meanwhile, in the ensuing Q&A, a developer in the audience said this: “We’re working with Sony on a Ghostbusters game, and it’s going to be augmented reality.” So now you know.
I put this on two other sites so I might as well put it here…
What exactly qualifies Android to play the role of Windows in this fantasy scenario? Putting aside the foolishness of comparing the PC market to the smart phone market, what feature does Android possess, other than ubiquity, to compare to Windows to argue that Android can be leveraged to devastate Apple in market share? Microsoft’s Windows, regardless of what one thinks of its performance and features thru the 90′s, was an OS with a consistent interface that ran across dozens of different configurations of hardware and if you had sufficient RAM and HDD space, a program you used on a Compaq looked, ran and performed identically to the OS/program combo on an IBM or a Dell. An update to the Windows OS was an update that could be deployed office/company/country-wide, even globally. Compare this to the legions of Android based abandonware handsets that will never get an update.
Unless and until Android reaches a level of interface and performance consistency (never mind support or even updates past original purchase) , Androids market share alone will not make any developer the same amount of money as a lesser number of Apple products which not only get updates going back three years of hardware, but have a consistent OS across both the iPhone and the iPad. Androids cumulative market share will be of no service to Google or it’s partners as a monopoly capable of being wielded as Windows was/is on the PC. Except as a continuing delivery mechanism for ads.