LZ,
Correct me, if I am interpreting your post to mean this is the end of Commander style games as we know it?
No, that would be an inaccurate conclusion. I rather would say that cross-platform releases are commercially wiser than single platform ones in the long run. Building a complete a complete new custom engine and port it ourselves is just no longer economically justified with alternatives as Unity around the corner.
Of course this is looking back, when we started designing CTGW these commercial affordable, well supported and community driven game engines, like Unity or Unreal cross-platform engines, were not around yet or were just servicing with very limited use. Now 6 years later, it is a big difference.
A new Commander game will come one day, just no idea where to plan it in at this point. A solution we are looking at, is looking for a co-developing partner, a good Commander game will economically do fine, especially as we have a good custom engine for it now. It would be a shame and a waste not to use it again.
I've been working on a PC only game for a long time and seen many PC only games at Matrix. Will you still accept such?
Of course, PC by far is still the main and important platform, I would always advise to first develop a good and stable PC game before considering porting to eg. tablets. As patching and updating tablets and in general cross-platform is a logistic nightmare, you better do a solid PC game first before porting.
But you can develop a good PC while keeping in mind cross-platform ports in the long run and keep your design flexible with future porting in mind.
This is more or less the path we follow since a few years, we just try to design good fun games and concentrate on PC first, but try and keep tablets in mind while designing and planning. Think of containing memory consumption, in what code you will write, will you go 2D or 3D, etc...
Warhammer 40,000 is a good example, iOS will come later this year, but we first will iron out and stabilize the PC version, but tablet ports were taken into consideration day one when we started planning and designing some years ago.
Having more markets to sell on is just a wise business strategy if you want to stay afloat in this business. Just my personal 2 cents here.
Cheers,
Tim aka LZ
