Game Center, iCloud and Universal support on games - how important are these for you?

[Appvism]

Hello all,

New to these forums and i have a very common question for you! I am looking to build games and apps for the iOS platform and wanted to ask for your opinion about how important is it to you that games and apps have support for Game Center and iCloud and are Universal? Do you expect these features to be standard these days? And if you were to pick one, which one of these would you consider to be most important? For example, I see quite a few games which have a separate HD version, but is this a good thing in your eyes?

To give you an idea about myself, i do play a lot of games on my iPhone, a little less on my iPad (surprisingly, maybe i just prefer the portability of my iPhone whereas the iPad feels a little heavy). I find i don't really care about Game Center achievements and leaderboards, and this is not a deal breaker to me. However, since i have two iDevices, universal support is great because i just can install the same app.

I would like to hear your thoughts on this!

Thanks for reading.

 

[Alli]

A universal binary is a must these days. It doesn't require that many more coding hours, so devs that require separate purchases are not being fair. (I know this from experience.)

Game Center is a big pile of fail, and will probably go the way of Ping eventually.

 

[Appvism]

Game Center is a big pile of fail, and will probably go the way of Ping eventually.

Interesting thought! Obviously its down to personal tastes and likes, but for me, i pretty much never use GC. In fact i find it annoying when the iOS automatically logs you in whenever you enter your apple id password , such as when downloading an app.

 

[Appvism]

I don't think universal is a must as long as the experiences are different enough to make it worthwhile to buy both.

Yeah, i can see the point of that if the experiences are different enough. But as you mentioned, if the game is exactly the same but with retina graphics then it should be universal. The only reason against this that i can see is if by adding the extra retina graphics, the file size greatly increases - so you may want to only package the appropriate grahics for the approriate device.

I'm looking to develop iOS apps and am planning on going down the universal route to be honest. To me, it feels a little "dishonest" to sell a separate HD/iPad only version.