I got an iPad recently, and it seems to me that these devices would be perfect for a pay to play game like MTGO. When I started thinking about it, it's kind of absurd that there isn't already a MTGO iPad and/or android app. Wizards could be making a buttload of money from this market.
They don't even have MTGO for OS X or any other operating system that isn't Windows. I think they should work on that first. But, then, iPads / tablets is also a market that they should definitely tap into. Like any other business decision, it comes down to a cost / benefit analysis. As the above poster suggests, perhaps the cost of developing such an application is too high to justify the potential benefits / payoffs.
Wizards also just seems to be slow to tap into technology...I mean arn't we just now getting our first offical app when people have been doing it for years.
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Wizards also just seems to be slow to tap into technology...I mean arn't we just now getting our first offical app when people have been doing it for years.
Slow and bad at it. MTGO is fully functional and all but it feels like an app from the stone age of computing.
1. The coding would be enormous to even attempt to convert.
2. The interface would make it impractical. End of Story and thread.
Neither of these is true. If their backend is even remotely well written, a skilled engineer could write an ipad app for it in a reasonable length of time. It would be impractical to do in one's spare time, but certainly if WotC wanted to pay a few guys for 6 months, they could get it done. And MTGO has one of the worst interfaces imaginable - you could do a vastly better interface than we already have on the ipad pretty easily.
This is almost certainly not true. It's taken them years to get to the point that the system is even stable--there's no way the code is in good enough shape to be ported to anything else.
From the perspective of someone who writes code for a living, it could definitely be done. I wouldn't even begin to attempt to port whatever garbage code they're using for MTGOv3. A talented team of developers could easily have the app running in a year, if not less. And it would make them huge amounts of money.
The problem, I think, is that Wizards is not really willing to make the proper investments in technology. There's probably upper level execs at either Wizards or Hasbro who don't quite understand technology, and maybe they're a little scared of it, so they don't want to make the proper investment in it.
Which I think is also part of the problem why MTGOv4 is taking so long. From what I understand, Wizards out sourced the development, which looks like it would be cheaper on paper, but almost always leads to a vastly inferior end product.
1. The coding would be enormous to even attempt to convert.
2. The interface would make it impractical. End of Story and thread.
Yep. Also, we get this thread all the time, and I always say the same thing:
apple is about 11% of the U.S. computer market share. They aren't going to spend a lot of time, money, and effort developing another product, when their current product can run on 90% of the computers in the country. I get that our magic-playing community is relatively young and tech-savvy, so we want to see this done, but you have to look at it from Wizards' perspective. Until they can develop a way to do it cheaply, it just doesn't make sense to develop multiple versions of the same program, especially when the current update is taking basically forever.
It is true that apple is about 60% of the mobile market (due to the ipad), but realistically, people who want to play will find a way to do it through just buying a really cheap laptop (I got a kind of decent to mediocre compaq for $250 that I use to play), or using parallels or whatever.
Yep. Also, we get this thread all the time, and I always say the same thing:
apple is about 11% of the U.S. computer market share. They aren't going to spend a lot of time, money, and effort developing another product, when their current product can run on 90% of the computers in the country. I get that our magic-playing community is relatively young and tech-savvy, so we want to see this done, but you have to look at it from Wizards' perspective. Until they can develop a way to do it cheaply, it just doesn't make sense to develop multiple versions of the same program, especially when the current update is taking basically forever.
It is true that apple is about 60% of the mobile market (due to the ipad), but realistically, people who want to play will find a way to do it through just buying a really cheap laptop (I got a kind of decent to mediocre compaq for $250 that I use to play), or using parallels or whatever.
I mentioned both apple and android in my opening post. Also, there's no need for people on this forum to be covering hasbro/wizards arse on this one because they are clearly doing a terrible job at getting MTGO into this current decade. My original post was to suggest that if they pulled their finger out and did it right, it would pay huge dividends for them.
Some sort of browser based game would be ideal imo, because official apps for android and iPad would be relatively easy to implement afterward.
I mentioned both apple and android in my opening post. Also, there's no need for people on this forum to be covering hasbro/wizards arse on this one because they are clearly doing a terrible job at getting MTGO into this current decade. My original post was to suggest that if they pulled their finger out and did it right, it would pay huge dividends for them.
Some sort of browser based game would be ideal imo, because official apps for android and iPad would be relatively easy to implement afterward.
I agree -- a browser based game would be ideal, but I think they are wary of it for security reasons. If they could implement it, it would be the most elegant solution though; I'll give you that
I suspect part of the reason there's never been an OS X port of MTGO (and likely never will be one for it or iOS) is that Wizards in South Renton, Washington, is located not so far from Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. I'm sure it's easy for them to hire software engineers with the right skill sets to develop for Microsoft APIs.
And it's obviously a gross error for Wizards to have never ported MTGO to OS X. OS X may not have a huge market share based on simple numbers (roughly 10%), but Apple has a sizable dollar share of the computer market (roughly 30%). Moreover, Apple owners tend to be better off and more likely to spend money on content.
But let's leave Apple aside. Wizards is ignoring not only the Mac and iOS market, but the Windows-based tablet and smart phone market as well. The Windows Presentation Foundation API that they're building the new client on won't run on these ARM-powered Windows devices.
Why Wizards continues to develop MTGO in a desktop-Windows-only environment I'll never understand. All the client has to do is report the game state and provide the ability to make game decisions. You could do a perfectly good job with 80x25 text mode! It'd probably even be more pleasant to use than the MTGO v3 interface, which deserves a lifetime achievement award for causing user misery.
In conclusion, Wizards should just fire their entire software development team and start from scratch.
With MTGA, this has the potential for still interesting and relevant discussion, so I'm going to leave this open. Please keep the thread's age in mind while replying to older posts.
I think people forget that WotC was actually one of the pioneers in the digital CCG marketplace. The problem is that they failed to develop and evolve their product over the years. Now other companies have caught up and have vastly surpassed WotC in this realm.
Arena was made in Unity, so it will eventually come to tablets.
As for a new version of MTGO... Not likely. They will keep it around, sticking as much duct tape on the program as possible to keep it functional but I would not expect any major overhauls... Unless Arena fails. Then WotC will have to update MTGO.
Putting the existing app in a HTML website and simply calling that from any device would be totally viable, but WotC is not really going to do any work.
They just dont really give enough , even if its a potential gold cow.
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2. The interface would make it impractical. End of Story and thread.
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Slow and bad at it. MTGO is fully functional and all but it feels like an app from the stone age of computing.
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Neither of these is true. If their backend is even remotely well written, a skilled engineer could write an ipad app for it in a reasonable length of time. It would be impractical to do in one's spare time, but certainly if WotC wanted to pay a few guys for 6 months, they could get it done. And MTGO has one of the worst interfaces imaginable - you could do a vastly better interface than we already have on the ipad pretty easily.
This is almost certainly not true. It's taken them years to get to the point that the system is even stable--there's no way the code is in good enough shape to be ported to anything else.
The problem, I think, is that Wizards is not really willing to make the proper investments in technology. There's probably upper level execs at either Wizards or Hasbro who don't quite understand technology, and maybe they're a little scared of it, so they don't want to make the proper investment in it.
Which I think is also part of the problem why MTGOv4 is taking so long. From what I understand, Wizards out sourced the development, which looks like it would be cheaper on paper, but almost always leads to a vastly inferior end product.
Yep. Also, we get this thread all the time, and I always say the same thing:
apple is about 11% of the U.S. computer market share. They aren't going to spend a lot of time, money, and effort developing another product, when their current product can run on 90% of the computers in the country. I get that our magic-playing community is relatively young and tech-savvy, so we want to see this done, but you have to look at it from Wizards' perspective. Until they can develop a way to do it cheaply, it just doesn't make sense to develop multiple versions of the same program, especially when the current update is taking basically forever.
citation: http://ctwatchdog.com/finance/2012-computer-reliability-report-lenovo-most-reliable-acer-least-reliable-apple-declined
It is true that apple is about 60% of the mobile market (due to the ipad), but realistically, people who want to play will find a way to do it through just buying a really cheap laptop (I got a kind of decent to mediocre compaq for $250 that I use to play), or using parallels or whatever.
*DCI Rules Advisor*
I mentioned both apple and android in my opening post. Also, there's no need for people on this forum to be covering hasbro/wizards arse on this one because they are clearly doing a terrible job at getting MTGO into this current decade. My original post was to suggest that if they pulled their finger out and did it right, it would pay huge dividends for them.
Some sort of browser based game would be ideal imo, because official apps for android and iPad would be relatively easy to implement afterward.
Juju Alters - Altered MTG Cards
I agree -- a browser based game would be ideal, but I think they are wary of it for security reasons. If they could implement it, it would be the most elegant solution though; I'll give you that
*DCI Rules Advisor*
And it's obviously a gross error for Wizards to have never ported MTGO to OS X. OS X may not have a huge market share based on simple numbers (roughly 10%), but Apple has a sizable dollar share of the computer market (roughly 30%). Moreover, Apple owners tend to be better off and more likely to spend money on content.
But let's leave Apple aside. Wizards is ignoring not only the Mac and iOS market, but the Windows-based tablet and smart phone market as well. The Windows Presentation Foundation API that they're building the new client on won't run on these ARM-powered Windows devices.
Why Wizards continues to develop MTGO in a desktop-Windows-only environment I'll never understand. All the client has to do is report the game state and provide the ability to make game decisions. You could do a perfectly good job with 80x25 text mode! It'd probably even be more pleasant to use than the MTGO v3 interface, which deserves a lifetime achievement award for causing user misery.
In conclusion, Wizards should just fire their entire software development team and start from scratch.
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Arena was made in Unity, so it will eventually come to tablets.
As for a new version of MTGO... Not likely. They will keep it around, sticking as much duct tape on the program as possible to keep it functional but I would not expect any major overhauls... Unless Arena fails. Then WotC will have to update MTGO.
They just dont really give enough , even if its a potential gold cow.
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