Reality check

[Ryan Brown]

lads we don't all need macs to develope for the iphone etc. the Unreal engine allows you to develope for the iphone on a pc (tho im not 100% sure how the is then ported to the mac). What I do know is that it is definitly possible and since udk is only available on pc and unreal games have been put on the iphone (infinity blade and the citidel), it would then mean that the only way to code for udk on the iphone is the pc.

Lets talk numbers, how much is udk? well free so long as u use it for educational purposes... if you release a game then it will cost $100, which isnt that bad, so to release on the iphone would cost $100 for the apple licence and $100 for the udk licence which would mean that it would be $200 (yeah simples right). However there is a bit of a snag, if we were to make a successful game (greater than $5000 made) udk will then want a 25% cut on whatever we make... that means that apple will take 30% giving us 70%, udk will then take 25% of that 70% so that we are left with the rest. So how much do we get? right well that 25% is technically 17.5% of the original so thats 30+17.5 = 47.5%, meaning we get 52.5%. Personally, I like the fact that udk do it this way, since it means that a start up company can use the package for pretty much nothing. As a start up option i would advise going down this route first to make a bit of money.

Another way to play the market would be to create a free to play game for the iphone. For those of you who do not no what a free to play game is, check out farmville on facebook. Altought the game is free to play, ppl still buy money inorder to progress through the game quicker. What is hoped here is that the game makes money on the iphone (a good bit like) or at least enough for us to launch the bugger on facebook. Why don't we just do that anyway? well inorder to do that we would need a dedicated server and flash. flash is alot of money for the commercial licence (how much, havent checked and i would but my internet is being really shit lol), and a dedicated server, well it would need to be big enough to cope with the traffic that farmville etc cope with (50 mill+). Ok ok, maybe not as big as 50 mill to start like, but it would need to at least a good 10 thousand, and it would also need to be on constantly.

Also Im of the opinion that the more iphone games we release, the more we will tend to make and the more we will take advantage of the year licence. Also the free to play game does not need to be in 3d, infact ideally it should be isometric, which means that instead of udk, we would only need to use cocos, which also means that we would get 70% instead of 52.5%. The draw back, to code using cocos you need a mac, simple as that...