iCloud and iOS Games

TouchArcade’s Brad Nicholson asked some indie iOS game developers about iCloud and support for syncing save states across devices:

It’s also obvious to us that iCloud and the implementation of it needs to be easier, and the service itself needs to be more reliable. Almost every studio we talked to had some trepidations or a horror story to share. Browse our message board, and you’ll find even more from users receiving the bad end of an iCloud problem.

That’s not to say iCloud isn’t awesome. It is. Games that use it, like Infinity Blade 2, are better for the implementation. iCloud could also be used for stuff beyond saves, so there’s promise of what’s to come. We simply want to see more of it.

In the case of smaller, independent developers of games for the iPhone and iPad, money is the main reason why iCloud often gets cut off from the list of features to implement at the last minute. For as much as we like to think of indie games as modern versions of DOS games programmed in a garage with virtually zero costs and lots of caffeine (and weird haircuts), the reality is that creating the latest $0.99 hit for iPhone is based off real business rules with real associated costs. As TouchArcade quoted a developer saying, “keep making games” is just as important as “making games”. The business side of things needs to be taken care of; when time is running out, iCloud typically gets sacrificed for the greater good – shipping the game.

I believe, however, that there is a deeper reason as to why developers are choosing to think about iCloud at the last minute. Why aren’t developers considering native iCloud integration from the get-go? And why is that only bigger, triple-A titles have been able to successfully use and ship with iCloud integration so far?

When I talked to developers about the first six months of iCloud, the reaction was the same: iCloud is great when it works, but there’s a need for better documentation and debugging tools. iCloud requires a lot of technical work to be implemented and customer support once it’s made available; not all developers are willing to go through this effort right now, and, unsurprisingly, only bigger development studios with consequently bigger budgets and support staff are pursuing iCloud sync for games.

With the WWDC approaching, here’s to hoping Apple will incentivize developers to consider iCloud integration as the foundation for apps and games. Third-party software is better with iCloud, iOS is better because of iCloud, but the platform for the next decade needs to find its early adopters in the people that will ultimately improve the platform going forward: iOS developers.