The day before yesterday, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber was the first to point out that iPhone OS 4 SDK bans cross-compiled applications, promoted as a key-feature for Adobe’s upcoming Flash CS5:

“Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).”

Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow weighed in at his TheFlashBlog:

“What they are saying is that they won’t allow applications onto their marketplace solely because of what language was originally used to create them. This is a frightening move that has no rational defense other than wanting tyrannical control over developers and more importantly, wanting to use developers as pawns in their crusade against Adobe. This does not just affect Adobe but also other technologies like Unity3D…
Speaking purely for myself, I would look to make it clear what is going through my mind at the moment. Go screw yourself Apple.”

As the dust starts to settle, it does not seem to be clear though, if this was a move by Apple solely to kick Adobe in the sternum. AppleInsider reports today:

“But if Apple were simply trying to block Adobe from cross-compiling Flash to create iPhone apps, it could have added the changed text to its existing license agreement and spoiled Adobe’s CS5 party immediately, rather than just threatening change that appears fated to kick in when Apple delivers iPhone 4.0 in June…

The primary reason for the change, say sources familiar with Apple’s plans, is to support sophisticated new multitasking APIs in iPhone 4.0. The system will now be evaluating apps as they run in order to implement smart multitasking. It can’t do this if apps are running within a runtime or are cross compiled with a foreign structure that doesn’t behave identically to a native C/C++/Obj-C app.

‘[The operating system] can’t swap out resources, it can’t pause some threads while allowing others to run, it can’t selectively notify, etc. Apple needs full access to a properly-compiled app to do the pull off the tricks they are with this new OS,’ wrote one reader under the name Ktappe.”

Personally, I am more interested if Unity3D will be affected by this rule as well (as expressed by many other users in the Unity3D-Developers’ Forum). In a posting at Unity’s official blog, CEO and co-founder David Helgason points out today:

“Here at Unity, we are working hard on getting good information, and working to understand whether – or how – the new changes could affect the developer community and others. We have reached out to both official and unofficial contacts at Apple, we are talking to other companies in a similar situation to us, and we’ve been diligent in reading the ToS to get to the best legal (and business-wise) analysis of it.

We haven’t heard anything from Apple about this affecting us, and we believe that with hundreds of titles (or probably over a thousand by now), including a significant proportion of the best selling ones, we’re adding so much value to the iPhone ecosystem that Apple can’t possibly want to shut that down.

Our current best guess is that we’ll be fine. But it would obviously be irresponsible to guarantee that. What I can guarantee is that we’ll continue to do everything in our power to make this work, and that we will be here to inform you when we know more – as soon as we know more.”

It’s hard to say how Unity3d might be affected; it produces Xcode and Objective-C source files more like a pre-processor rather than a cross-compiler. But then again, Unity-developers are coding in C-Sharp and Javascript, which seems to violate the point of “only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs.” This might be an issue, but could probably be fixed with a Unity-update; Unity3D’s team is known for such fixes, as Helgason points out:

“In the ancient days of the App Store (July 2008), Apple changed the kernel to disallow JIT (just-in-time) compilation. We worked around this by changing Mono to AOT (ahead of time) compile scripts instead (this is why some dynamic constructs in our JavaScript doesn’t work on the iPhone). It was a lot of work, but we made it work to enable all these amazing Unity games to be sold in the App Store…”

Interesting recaps on WoWs history in China have been posted at two (totally games-unrelated) blogs, written by China-based international lawyer Dan Harris and Dan Maas, head of special effects company, Maas Digital:

“Blizzard had successfully brought WoW into the Chinese market in 2005 through a license agreement with local game developer The9. The relationship turned sour last summer when negotiations to renew the license bogged down in a dispute over division of profits. Blizzard ultimately decided to terminate The9’s license and shift WoW’s China operations to another local company, NetEase. (The9 responded acrimoniously, filing suit against Blizzard and announcing development of its own sword-and-sorcery game called “World of Fight”). WoW was knocked off-line for over three months during the transition, leaving a gigantic vacuum in the market which competitors rushed to fill. Kingsoft, Shanda, and other gaming companies stepped up promotional efforts to lure former WoW players to their own games…”

The punch-line here seems to be that western companies like Blizzard are struggling with an unclear regulatory atmosphere and sharing of revenues, while local developers are thriving on better cultural understanding and other practical advantages (like smoother payment systems, looser regulatory oversight, etc.)

Read the full post after the jump.

South China Morning Post yesterday broke news about how Facebook repeatedly deleted groups of political opposition in Hong Kong:

“A Facebook group with 84,298 members formed to oppose the pro-establishment DAB was deleted
Kelvin Sit Tak-O, who runs a discussion group that opposes the pro-establishment party, the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), said his group’s Facebook page was shut down without notice on Thursday. The group had 84,298 members and was aiming for 100,000… The closures could have been triggered by opponents flagging the group as “abusive” with Facebook administrators, Mr. Sit speculated. A spokesperson for Facebook was not immediately available for comment.”

As blogger Joanne Ooi cites:

“‘Apart from my own group, I’ve heard that other groups with an anti-DAB message have also been closed. We’ve written complaint letters, but we’ve only received standard replies about how [Facebook] is working on this case,’ Sit said. …
Kelvin told me that although the original page is still down, he relaunched a new page, which has already hit 50,000 members since it launched 3 days ago.”

Hong Kong’s DAB is a pro-Beijing political party. Party leader Ma Lik denies the Tiananmen massacre, as Wikipedia has it.

Hong Kongers have always seen themselves as China’s last bastion of free speech — it’s sad to see how this is jeopardized by Facebook’s supposed anticipatory obedience.

Adam Martin has posted an interesting Article called “2010 and the Browser MMO” at his blog T-Machine, essentially raising the question, how a contemporary browser MMO should look and feel like:

“It’s 2010. I know a lot of people in the industry still haven’t accepted even the concept of a “browser-based” MMO, let alone realise where they’ve got to now…

For a look at today, go browse some of the Unity demos. Unity is *not* the “best” 3D engine, the fastest, the best language – but it’s nicely balanced towards ease of adoption. It’s very easy for new developers to get into. And so it’s setting a very achievable base standard that’s higher than many people would believe. With anyone able to produce 3D to this level, and embed it in the browser almost as an afterthought, the use of plugins becomes a new landscape…”

I would argue that this is an issue for every “serious” browser-game: probably 99% percent of all browser-games currently run on Flash, but Flash is not powerful enough to render graphics comparable to modern “professional” games — or even to 3D-environments like Unity. With the advent of new browser-plug-ins like Unity and others, the bar for good-looking browser-game-graphics is raised dramatically. The more people playing such 3D-games, or using services like Gaikai and OnLive during he next years, the higher the expectation will be how a “good-looking” browser-game should look like.

In my opinion, Adobe needs to react quickly to expand Flash’s capabilities soon. Hardware-acceleration, import of 3D-assets or some specialized Actionscript-libraries might be an idea. Otherwise, Flash-based games might soon be the equivalent of the Javascript- and applet-games of some 10 years ago.

Google reported cyber attacks to its network, originating from China and reportedly targeting email-accounts of Chinese human rights activists, as David Drummond, Google’s Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer writes:

“In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google…

…we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists… Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.”

Drummond concludes that Google will react by not un-censoring all results on Google.cn from now on, which might even lead to shuttering their service in Mainland.

An impressive reaction — with only a minor flaw. Google never had a substantial footing in China; according to various sources its market penetration is around 30%, whereas Baidu — China’s largest search-engine has a share of over 90%. I am guessing that their revenue from Mainland is insubstantial. I don’t want to sound cynical, but it’s a convenient moment to push human rights if it doesn’t cost you anything. Google might even utilize this opportunity to exit the Mainland market without loosing their face before they fall flat like Facebook.

A very happy Christmas to everybody from the Coobico-team, and a happy new year. While development of Coobico will still go on during the holidays, there will probably no blog-post before new year.

Free-to-play and micro-transactions are trends migrating from Asia to western MMOs in the past years—even being picked up by major players like Sony and EA. Still, it has not yet been proven if gamers’ acceptance of microtransactions matches the Asian level of market penetration and if thusly generated revenue can sustain western MMOs.

Gamasutra recently ran an article called “What Gamers Think About Microtransactions” about the findings of Daniel Kromand who asked hardcore-gamers, who “were all experienced gamers and ranged from early twenties to mid-thirties”, about their angle on MT:

“Some games have premium items for sale, but the interviewed players were largely skeptical towards these transactions. The reason is that they threaten to tilt the perceived fairness of the game, because established players fear that newcomers can buy their way to success: ‘I don’t think they would like [expensive, powerful items] very much. Because then it means that you can be better than me, [just] because you have a bigger wallet.‘ (Peter)“

Even if taken with a grain of salt, this indicates that there are differences in acceptance of personally buying MT-items or approving fellow players using micro-transactions.

Link this to EA and SOE, who are currently changing their free-to-play-formula, probably due to a lack of revenue: EA’s DICE has raised the in-game costs of items in Battlefield Heroes while reducing real-money costs, as Eurogamer reports:

“EA’s DICE has changed the item pricing structure for its free-to-player shooter Battlefield Heroes, reducing the real-money cost of items while making their cost to rent or buy with in-game currency dramatically more expensive…
One player, quoted by Ars Technica, calculated that they would have to play 50 matches a day just to afford to keep a powerful weapon using VP. In effect, the choice for players who want to be competitive is now between spending money or submitting to serious grind. Needless to say, it’s been a very unpopular move.“

Likewise, according to an interview with Sony Online Entertainment’s Creative Director for Free Realms, Laralyn McWilliams, SOE will implement a pay-wall in their popular F2P-title “Free Realms” with the upcoming update, where all in-game jobs will become free of charge, but only up to a level 4. Higher levels will be restricted to premium members (except for players who have already achieved higher levels so far). “Freemium” comes to mind, a business model which relies on offering basic services for free, while charging a premium for advanced or special features (and which is not so different from your typical World of Warcraft 10 days test-drive).

Two studies about the american and european gaming-market were published lately: NPD’s “Entertainment Trends in America” and Today’s Gamers International Gamers Survey. According to NPD, 14 percent of all U.S. households subscribe to online gaming subscription services (August 2009), while the Today’s Gamers survey claims that “MMOs constitute 14 percent of all time spent playing video games in the U.S.“, where of “ the U.S. online population surveyed, 21 percent said they play MMOs. 45 percent of those count themselves as paying MMO players, while 30 percent have spent money on casual game portals.“

Now, I can’t say if 14 percent of all households match 21 percent of the surveyed U.S. online population, but as Tobold points out, the subscription numbers seem to pretty high. It seems to be in ballpark of 15-20 million according to world internet usage statistics. According to the reported age (8-12 years old), my guessing would be that a large number of these so-called MMO-subscribers come from online-worlds like Club Penguin (which is, of course, comparing apples to oranges).

Apart from that, incidentally, Today’s Gamers International Gamers Survey claims that the MMO market share in the EU is around 13-14 percent, meaning that the MMO market in the U.S. is around 60% larger than in Europe. In case these figures can be trusted, I wonder where the gap comes from; is it a difference in credit card- or broadband-penetration? Or the more difficult european heterogeneous market?

Via Gamasutra.

As much as I hate to be a smart-ass, but I’ve been highly skeptical already last year about Facebook’s acclaimed attempt to conquer the Mainland’s social network market. Just like I predicted, FB’s efforts are folding, as the Wall Street Journal reports–with active users dwindling, from one million… to around 14,000:

“Many Facebook users found proxies and other methods of connecting to Facebook, and many others stood by, hoping the Web site would be unblocked quickly (no luck yet). Meanwhile, according to Inside Facebook, the Web site’s latest statistics showed only 14,000 active users in China as of the beginning of October, down from a million in July….
It’s no secret among people in the Internet business in China that Facebook was interested in the world’s largest Internet user population. But apparently — according to various parties that met with a delegation of Facebook officials some time in the last few years — they came, they saw, and they left Chinese social networking Web sites like Renren.com…”

Renren actually is the former Xiaonei, who started as blatant FB carbon copy, ending up with more venture capital under their belts than the original. The Renren domain was, by the way, home to an early Chinese socnet, about 10 years ago, as VirtualReview has it. This rebranding seems to indicate Xiaonei’s future plans: while Xiaonei literal meaning is “inside school”, Renren is Pinyin for “everyone”.

The Chinese socnet market is continuously dominated by Xiaonei/Renren, Kaixin001 and 51.com.

We have updated the gallery of the development blog of our upcoming MMO Coobico with a bunch of new screenshots of our current alpha version — take a look after the jump.