For the launch of the iPhone 4S in Hong Kong, a crowd of 3000 gathered in front of the Apple flagship store at the IFC tower. Chris Chang has posted an article about the events at M.I.C.Gadget:

“Over three thousand people gathered outside the Hong Kong Apple store for the launch of the iPhone 4S in Hong Kong, but Apple will only allow 1,250 people to line up. A scuffle nearly broke out, and police were called to keep everything under control.”

Apple will open a flagship store in Hong Kong — with its four other stores being located in Beijing and Shanghai. According to Ming Pao, the 20,000-sqf store will open on Sept. 24 in the prestigious IFC Mall.

It was about time, with market-share of iOS-devices in HK at a felt 90 percent…

via Mashable

InsideMobileApps offer some interesting insight in the market-shares of iOS and Android in China (according to AdMob-statistics at an iOS developers’ conference in Mainland:

“China is fast-becoming the second-largest market in terms of downloads for many developers including companies like Rovio, but it lags behind in terms of monetization. The country came in just behind the U.S. in page views on Google’s AdMob advertising network in July, according to statistics the network shared at an iOS developer conference in China this past weekend…”

The gist of it: iOS stills seems to have the upper hand in spite of lower incomes, and the Android-market is fragmented in many local variants with non of them that big yet.

Facebook will open up a regional office in Hong Kong to handle ad sales, presumably for the Hong Kong and Taiwan market. Says Blake Chandlee, vice president and commercial director of Asia Pacific, Latin America and emerging markets:

“By continuing to build our presence in the region, Facebook will be able to directly provide full support to advertisers here and help them create and execute campaigns that will have a meaningful impact on their businesses…”

FB had failed to gain any real traction in Mainland before (as predicted), with active users dwindling from around 1 million to only 14,000 from July to October 2009, as reported by Wall Street Journal. Finally, the social network was blocked in Mainland, completely — presumably in the aftermath of the protests in Xinjiang.

Via Mashable

Rovio and PopCap, developers of mobile top-sellers Angry Birds and Bejeweled seem to have violated Apple’s rules of privacy by sending user data to third parties like Flurry (which, essentially, is Google Analytics for mobile devices). Rovio strongly denied any violation, even though

a) applications were rejected before for having included Flurry Analytics, and
b) Flurry needed to back off data collection only a few months ago.

Maybe Rovio and PopCap just need to wait until Apple has implemented its own analytics service…

Market research firm Newzoo has published data from their survey about the U.S. and European MMO markets: while 47.5 million Americans play persistent online games, around 30 million Europeans are MMO gamers. With annual revenues of around US$2.28 billion, the total U.S persistent online game revenues are nearly twice as large as the combined European online game markets.

Interestingly, a statement from Newzoo claims that “the free-to-play model is hugely popular (…) in Europe”, but according to their own study, the market-share of free-to-play titles is very similar both in the U.S. and in Europe (74% and 79%). Where the markets really differ is the share of pay-to-play: while subscription-based games make up 9% in Germany and 11% in France, they have a market-share of 17% in the U.S.

The relatively small group of subscription-based titles at the same time make up the highest-grossing games: according to GigaOm, the annual revenue of WoW, Lineage, Club Penguin, Runescape, Warhammer, Age of Conan and LotRo (the later offers a mixed business model as of lately) make up for roughly half of the whole MMO market.

To me, these figures proof the general conclusion that there is a distinction between big budget games (mostly subscription-based) and smaller-scale titles, which often go free-to-play.

Via Worlds In Motion

Adobe will add hardware-accelerated 3D to Flash in the first half of 2011. A commenter on Gamasutra gave the opinion that this spells trouble for Unity3D next year. I would like to throw my own three thoughts into the ring:

Market-penetration
Flash has a dominant market-penetration with its older installed plug-in base. But new hardware-accelerated features will require the latest Flash-plugin. Unity seems to have a different approach to its plugin-architecture: more logic seems to be compiled into code, rather than in the plugin; the upgrade from Unity 2.6 to 3.0 did not necessitate any new plugin. Moreover, Unity caters to the gaming-console-market.

Unity is focussed
Unity concentrates on 3D-media and -games. Flash is capable of a lot more, but Unity is better at the things it does. Compare the working-metaphors of Flash and Unity for example: the mode of operation for Flash changed more and more to “do everything in code” with AS3 (especially when working with Flex). Unity makes use of a lot more of drag & drop and so-called “exposed properties”, which speeds up many production steps.

The production-pipeline
Unity has the edge over Flash with its integrated production-pipeline: you simply drop more or less any file-format into your working folder and it immediately becomes available in Unity. That’s a huge difference to the hoops you need to jump through to import complex 3D-assets into one of the large 3D-engines for Flash like Away, Sandy etc.

The long awaited new release of Unity3D is publicly available as of today. The download area is here.

Yesterday, Apple announced in a surprise press release that they are going to relax their rules for cross-compiled content on iPhone and iPad:

“In particular, we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need.”

Looks like the legal flood gates for stuff like Unity3D and Flash has openend — it will be interesting to see how this will influence the successful growth of HTML5

via FastCompany

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…”