I sort-of knew about this, but I thought it was corrected with the announcement of Scrabble Bonjour, where users can play against other iPhone Scrabblers over WiFi. Well, it turns out, Apple has no implementation in their SDK to allow for gaming over the internet. You will only be able to play locally on the same wireless network.
Everyone is talking about the iPhone being better than the DS or PSP in terms of mobile gaming. Until Apple allows online play in the SDK, there is a big hurdle for larger games to try to make their way to the iPhone. For a device that is always connected to at least a cellular network, it’s shocking that Apple isn’t allowing this. Hell, you could probably play some of these games against other players using 3G data and not WiFi.
Yeah I had assumed this would be available… bummer. Definitely a big oversight for connectivity with the product. Apple has never been game-savy but they could at least pay attention to what the community wants and needs. I always wondered why they never successfully grabbed up a piece of the gaming market. Their failed console/multimedia computer Pippin is an obscure footnote in gaming history ha. At least they gave it a shot, sort of.
dude that suxs big time
@toe
Indeed.
Online, multiplayer gaming on the iPhone is possible, it’s just more difficult and requires a lot more infrastructure (servers, bandwidth, etc).
Disclaimer: I worked on Versus Chess, which supports online multiplayer over EDGE/3G as well as Wi-Fi.