Right now there is not a _SINGLE_ device on the market catering to "mature" portable gamers. By this I mean a unit with a proper button layout, largish screen, decent battery life, and a backlit color screen. PPCs have their dismal battery life and IPAQ-multiple-button-inputs-not-registered issues, Palms have the usual shortcomings listed above, GBA has an atrocity of a screen (not counting backlight mods) and everything else has been put out to pasture (Nomad, Lynx, Turboexpress, Game Gear). I see an opening in the market ripe for a Sony PSX-branded unit engineered by the Clie team.

Oh well, I can at least continue to hope that Astraware will stop recycling Columns and Tetris type games and produce something in the vein of Zap! 2000 again. I'd also not mind seing a Shadowgate clone/port!

Anyway, where are you getting stats about Palm from? You seem so certain about Palm market sinking and not getting enough sales to warrant software developers... especially games.

I think you should double check some figures. If Palm is a bad platform, other PDA markets are worse. Do you mean don't do it for handhelds then? As far as I know 90% of handheld software sales (at least retail) is for Palm.

Also, the Palm games are pretty good quality. Unless you mean Nintendo Gameboy games are lousy too. Quite a few of the games emulate those games very well, or even allows you to run those games on your Palm.

B&W with poor sound can still be used for games. The Gameboy was B&W... and with poor sound. True, it is not good for all games. But still usable.

If (using your stats, which I doubt) 90% of Palm is using B&W, that's still 10% of the Palm market using Color. If 90% of WinCE/PocketPCs are color, and only 80% of them are PocketPC 2000/2002 (games/software for these platforms usually won't run on older OS without a lot of development time... don't forget that!), and WinCE/PocketPCs only has 4-5% of the market of PDAs (note, in total sales from advent of the devices, not current monthly sales)... I still think 10% of the Palm market is bigger than the PocketPC 2000/2002 capable machines. As a software developer... which would you pick? I think I know which one I would pick...

You're talking about P O R T I N G man !
Try porting WIN32 source to PalmOS. I can tell you this that's next to impossible.
At least A$traware built something ground up. Pity they don't seem to be able to come up with anything original anymore...

No sound, too limited to support complex API? Where have you been? I checked out your link and am already familiar with most of the games since I have friends with PPC. Main difference is that you guys seem to prefer Snake knock-offs over Tetris knock-offs. Here is a sample of clones from PocketGamer:

Breakout, Asteroids, PacMan, Tetris, Breakout, Snake, Missle Command, Xonix, Breakout, Breakout, PacMan, Defender, Frogger, Pipe Dreams, PacMan, SFCave, Snake, Missle Command, PacMan, Columns, Breakout, Snake, Snake, Space Invaders, Snake, Missle Command, Lunar Lander, Space Invaders, Pong, Tetris...

We hear a lot about a handfull of PPC games, but no one goes around showing off the dozen Breakout clones for PPC. I've yet to see one Breakout clone for PPC top Ababall for Palm OS. I also know there is no 16 bit Zap!2016 for PPC, especially for Jordana which only has 12 bit color (despite being advertised as 16 bit). Try taking a look at the 'un-lame' games like 3D StarFighter, Joust, Monopoly, or some of the other upper end games instead of complaining about the clones, which are just as abundant on the PPC side. Only one PPC owner I know even HAS doom, but does not play it much because of the battery drain. By the way, I still have a 90% charge after 3 hours of runtime today, which included a few rounds of Tennis Addict, Bejeweled, and Pocket Chess.

Just a note about the price - if you find the individual price too much, we do put games into packs to sell which work out at a much better value per game.

(The pack with Collapse is available now, a second PopCap pack with Big money in will be available shortly)

Regards,

Howard Tomlinson, Astraware.

I just wondered why, and if anyone else had noticed!

Just for explanation (from the horse's mouth, so to speak...)

I completely agree - Collapse and Big Money are *very* similar games indeed. There are subtle differences, and those who enjoy the games tend to prefer one over the other because of them, but I won't argue that the differences are more than superficial. I wouldn't expect anyone to buy both - but they're both available with a number of trials, so everyone is free to try both, and choose whichever they prefer, or neither!

These aren't games we've designed in-house - they are both fully licensed from GameHouse (for Collapse) and PopCap (for Big Money).
We work closely with both companies, who direct a lot of web traffic our way. A customer who reaches us from GameHouse will more likely try and buy Collapse - and similarly for PopCap traffic and Big Money. Hence for us, it makes a lot of sense to write both, even though we don't expect many customers to buy both. (some do!)

Both games are very popular in their own right - and I hope people would agree that each is a good, entertaining, and playable palm version of the web game. Whether the games are original (or distinct!) isn't in question - they're not - but they *are* each popular.

Its true, Astraware have done a lot of puzzle games and licenses recently. We're continuing to do licenses and work with other companies, but you can expect more of a variation in the types of games you'll see from us in the coming months :-) (Perhaps back to some of the types of games we became famous for...)

Regards,

Howard Tomlinson (CEO, Astraware)