iPad 1 Support, Why Bother?
Wakenbake
Member Posts: 24
How much time was wasted on this before the last submission? How much sooner could BG:EE been out for iPad if they didn't even bother with the iPad 1? I don't think anyone can reasonably expect ANY new game to work on their iPad 1 which is behind 2 years and 3 generations.
If you are going to spend time and money to get this to work on a specific iPad, you should focus on the current generation and improve the resolution.
If you are going to spend time and money to get this to work on a specific iPad, you should focus on the current generation and improve the resolution.
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Comments
We committed to supporting the iPad 1, and we're going to keep plugging at it to honour that commitment while improving the build across all the iPads.
Even so, I'd still like to see some goodies for the newer hardware. Obviously that isn't going to be on the horizon until the current version is more robust.
I'd love to have a shiny new piece of kit, but unless Santa has a suprise for me, I'll be stuck on my classic for the foreseeable future, and would love to have this game swallowing up vast quantities on memory!
Congratulations to the team on the release, the reviews have been great. Keep up the good work and keep the hope alive for me and all us iPad 1 owners!!!
Other than that, you are correct.
Learn to deal with it.
I think everyone who posts in a forum anything along the lines of "don't bother to support the old equipment" (because, obviously, only the rich deserve to have fun), or "just buy new equipment" (because obviously $500 to replace a perfectly good piece of equipment so you can play a $10 game makes perfect sense) should immediately be forced to buy that equipment for anyone reading the thread that wishes it. Talk about arrogance...
*Rant ON*
Plus, it is just plain sad the way youth see it as perfectly normal to spend insane amounts of money keeping up with equipment because of the way games are so-often programmed (NOT referring to this game here - keep up the good work on iPad 1 compatibility!). As long as that attitude is prevalent, game publishers will continue to release un-optimized junk, because they know darn well that idiots all over the world will go and spend good money to play the game. Why bother to program it well when it won't make you any additional money?
Young people: companies should *earn your money* and UNTIL they do, they should NOT get your money. Imagine if, upon the release of Skyrim, everyone with a 4-core processor (or more) said, "hey, this piece of junk only uses 2 cores! That's, like, 4-year old programming, forget this!" and then sang a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walked out without buying it? Their sales would have plummeted (half, a third?) and guess what? NEXT time Bethesda released a game they would program it properly. They would deserve our money. Wow, what a concept!
*Rant OFF*
Again, Beamdog, thanks SO much for keeping up the work on making this work on the iPad 1, my family has 3 iPads, and cannot afford a new iPad to play Baldur's Gate. We've been waiting a long time to play this game together, so we are very much looking forward to the iPad 1 version.
I have no problem with them supporting the iPad 1 so long as it is not at the expense of the current generation. Fortunately, in this case, it is beneficial to all iPad users.
The bottom line is this: Is it more profitable to support the iPad 1 or to put that time and energy into something else? That is Beamdog's call to make, and they obviously believe that there are enough iPad 1 users to warrant the support. I really don't see there being enough iPad 1 users to be worthwhile, but if it makes my iPad 4 run more stably and use less RAM I am happy.
It is also obvious that tablets are still underpowered. As power challenges are met, tablets will reach the point where they can play the kinds of games that cannot run on current gen devices. Are game developers supposed to put out inferior games to keep the lesser hardware in the loop?
Also, this is definitely not something where developers should be blamed. In fact, no one should be blamed. Mobile devices are still young and development is quick. This will eventually slow down as tablets become a commodity.
I sold mine when the iPad 2 was released, and got it effectively for half the price. Already there was apps and games struggling with the low memory on the iPad 1.
In fact, think it was an asshole move on Apple's part to put that little RAM in the iPad 1, I had trouble just surfing the web because it just didn't have the memory to keep more than one, sometimes (if I was lucky) two pages open at a time.
It's like someone pointed out earlier, the iPad 1 was for the early adopters, and it's always a risk to purchase that sort of hardware, it'll very soon be replaced by something much better.
That said, I fully understand that a lot of people don't have the economy to keep up with every new dangled device from Apple.
On the other hand....
It's now four generations of iPad's ago....
There must be a whole host of apps and games not supported or running very slow and buggy on the iPad 1 nowadays...