TinyGrasshopper

Sounds like this will be a step in the right direction. They're gonna have cross-platform (iOS and Android and Web) cloud saves, achievements, leader boards, and free cross-platform player matching. Good news for Android gaming! And mobile gaming in general it looks like. Also they're gonna surreptitiously have us all using Google Plus, lol.

http://www.polygon.com/2013/5/15/4333662/google-play-game-services

I've been on Spotify Premium for ages now. It's awesome. Their selection is unbelievably good. They have high quality syncing on mobile. The apps in the desktop client are great. They have last.fm syncing, even in the beta web client. And it's a dollar cheaper than rdio. And by having a free version, when times get tough, you can bump down to free and still keep your playlists.

The crappy thing about all the services though is that they all use your playlists to lock you in to their service. The playlists are the only way to maintain a collection and none of them have playlist export to m3u or pls

Wow, not the news I wanted to hear in the morning. I'm actually a little choked up. We will miss you.

I heard that Firefox 20 supports HTML 5 h.264 video on Windows now, by passing the video decoding off to the OS. So we can do html5 video out of the box on Windows theoretically.

It doesn't look there are any game-specific stuff in the recent redesign, but maybe there's gonna be some kinda piggyback effect for games. http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/9/4203236/google-launches-play-store-redesign-on-android

Are all triple-a games made in Montreal now? (or maybe I should say, does every publisher have a studio in Montreal making a triple-a game now?)

According to these bootcamp slides, for a presentation which happened last week, 80% of all mobile app purchases are iOS app purchases, so there is some truth to it. I don't subscribe to it, since I have no problem buying stuff once I've heard of it, but I almost never go to any app store, iOS or Android, looking for stuff to buy.

And it's not that you can't make money, you'll just make less. And you don't get popular when you do an Android release first, unless you don't have a choice, because Apple declined your app (cuz then you can garner headlines), or unless you're bootlegging an iOS app's idea.

I think a lot of what everyone here is saying are problems that exist but aren't that bad on Android anymore. According to the Android numbers from off their dev site, Most phones are on one of two versions of Android, either Gingerbread or Ice Cream Sandwich. And about 50% of devices have a similar size and screen density.

The store is just not very good, that's the main problem, I think.

This seems like an opportunity for Steam to step in and fix this. They have almost all the infrastructure already in place. They already know how online games retail should work. And they know what value added services gamers want.

By viable gaming platform, I mean mainly to break through that perception that iOS users and the general mobile gaming audience has. The perception that Android users are cheap and don't spend money on games, and therefore don't make a game for Android your priority because it's not going to make as much money as iOS on launch.

I think they should make a second play store just for games. It'll just be a place to just showcase the good stuff, that's mainly paid. And make a requirement to get Google certified.

The second thing they should do is to make a gratis value add service with features along the lines of gamecenter/xbox live/steam where games can have cloud saves, achievements, messaging etc. (They already have messaging through google talk), they should make the effort to pull it all together.

It would be nice if they could have a best-in-breed device, but that is basically the Nexus 7 + Nexus 10.

I hated it because it was so frivolous and forgettable. I couldn't get invested in anything that was going on in the campaign, and I'm sure to forget it soon. Maybe I might remember the characters, but I didn't remember them very well in WoL either. I couldn't remember an interesting thing that happens in WoL either.

I realise it's because SC2 is missing the political machinations that were going on in SC1. In SC1 all the people presiding over the war in each race, the commanders and whatnot, were arguing with each other in the mission and deliberating and figuring out what the next step was. There's none of that here. It's way too simplistic. It just feels boring and lazy as a result.

Also the characters motivations seem dubious.