After Microsoft showed off the ability to port games from a PC to a console to a Windows Phone 7 Series mobile phone, the world took notice. Who wouldn’t want to port quality games to their mobile phones? Unfortunately, Microsoft has decided to limit this technology strictly to Windows Phone 7 phones due later this year just in time for the holiday season.
In this regard, Novell is picking up the slack for Microsoft, which has obviously dropped the ball with bringing its hugely popular Xbox games to the most in demand mobile platforms hungry for the titles that presently dominate the video game industry. The word is that tomorrow, Novell is going to show the world a "new technology" that will make it possible for Xbox 360 games to be morphed into iPhone apps for gameplay on the ubiquitous Apple handset. At present, the iPhone incarnation of these games will be introduced first. Novell says the Android version of the technology won't be ready for some time. Yet according to the company, the Android version of the technology is in early stages of development.
Novell is clearly aiming to fill a huge void in the mobile gaming arena. And it looks like Microsoft isn't about to get in the way. At the annual Game Developers Conference that took place in San Francisco last week, the iPhone took center stage as the future of mobile gaming devices. Novell is rightly capitalizing on demand that shows no signs of slowing any time soon. For Microsoft, however, this is an incredibly frustrating situation, as developers continue to turn their attention in great numbers to the iPhone app building business. Just last month it was reported that more developers are now working on iPhone games than they are games for the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP.
Microsoft on the contrary has partnered with Nokia to port Silverlight, a .NET technology, to Symbian phones. But there has been no word about porting Xbox games to Symbian. Thankfully, the Mono team has taken up the slack where Microsoft decides it isn't going to play.
The iPhone app that Novell created is an open source derivative of an Indiana Jones games that Microsoft is showing off running on Windows, Windows Phone and Xbox. The game is built using Microsoft's XNA framework, which is based upon its .NET Framework.
Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 will run XNA 4.0 games, enabling developers of those games to reuse their investment and programming skills for Windows Phone handsets.
Novell is supporting XNA in its MonoTouch technology, which enables developers to translate .NET applications into native code on the iPhone. It has also done something similar for Android, but that solution is in its early stages of development (rumor is Microsoft may be porting Silverlight).
Interestingly, it seems that Microsoft is losing developer mind share as more and more apps are created specifically for Android and iPhone. What are your thoughts on this? Share your comments with us.
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