When 30% matters
Hello readers, I'm Robert and I'm responsible for audio development at Binary Dawn. All the wizz-bangs, pops, and thunks you hear are usually sampled from real world objects and then modified with software. In the future I will post about the audio related software, working with Apple's iPhone OS API, and so forth.
AdMob recently published metrics indicating that almost 30% of iPhone/iPod users have not upgraded to OS version 3. Being a small start up launching our first product, Binary Dawn had a decision to make: target the latest and greatest OS or stick with the last major OS revision and, as a result, have our product reach the most users possible.
At the inception of "Through To Iota" our design did not necessitate any features included the iPhone OS 3.0 API such as the GameKit Framework, Push Notifications, In App Purchase, and so on. We didn't want to force new features based on the new frameworks just because they were available, especially if it didn't make sense in the context of our game. On the other hand, with 84,000 apps (at that time) in the Apple App Store, it would be harder to stand out if similar games made use of newer features. We eventually decided that a good target for us would be 2.2.1 and we'd move forward with our final design based on this. We knew that this decision would still isolate demanding gamers who expected their games to have the latest features that technology allows. This would prove to be true after receiving our first review.
We received the review about a month after "Through to Iota" launched and one of the grievances the reviewer had was that the game did not support your own in-game iPod music. While this was technically incorrect, it was a direct result of expectations for the current OS abilities. In games that supported it, users can access their iPod music without having to exit the game. "Through to Iota" takes a different approach; launch your music before you start the game and it will continue playing in the background. While some may say this is not a good solution, I felt that it was a good compromise based our decision to stick with the previous OS while still allowing the user to listen to their own music library. Based on the feedback we received prior to this review, many others agreed with this.
