[casual_games] Is Everyone going to ABANDON FLASH for UNITY3D?

[Cory Petosky]

"Casual games" is bigger than just Facebook games obviously, but they'll 
be the last to switch, so they seem the most worth focusing on in this 
sort of discussion.

Ubiquity is a little less important now than it used to be -- Zynga 
could launch a game using Unity and you'd see your installed base 
increase by 40x in a week.

That said, why would Zynga (Playdom, Slide, etc...) ever make a game in 
Unity? I barely see Unity and Flash competing in this space, to be 
honest. You don't add much to Diner Dash or FrontierVille by making them 
in 3D.

Mechanically, it's unlikely the addition of a third dimension would 
increase sales of virtual goods. A primary socialization mechanic of a 
lot of these games is decorating your space, and I can't really see our 
users 'getting' it, at least not yet.

You can make great 2D games in Unity (Paper Moon, for example), but 
assuming pre-existing Flash development experience, it's only worthwhile 
to make the switch to Unity if performance is a bottleneck for your app, 
which is uncommon in the profitable Facebook game space as far as I can 
tell.

Also significantly, there's not a ready pool of 3D artists/animators 
available to gear up for content-heavy, virtual-goods-based approaches, 
let alone the single-serving ad-supported basement/dormitory-created 
games you see on Kongregate.

On 8/26/2010 8:14 AM, Derrick Morton wrote:

> At less than a 2% installed base of WW Internet users, they have a bit

> of work to do...

>

> On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 8:05 AM, oscar is oscar

> <oscar.oscar.oscar at gmail.com <mailto:oscar.oscar.oscar at gmail.com>> wrote:

>

>     Its in the air... I smell it.

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> --

> Derrick Morton

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