[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] gom99:
I hate to keep harping on this since I'm sure at the least we have an understanding of each others position. But I'd still like to make a few points.

However if you look at the trend in gaming technology a bit of fragmentation improves the gaming experience. The number of peripherals have gone up from Atari -> NES -> Master System -> ... -> 360/ps3/Wii.

There's simply more controls to use with newer systems to improve people's gaming experience. So it's the opposite of this consolidation you're telling me the industry is doing.

You can use a controller to play Guitar Hero, but the guitar is more fun after all. Just because alot of people bought the iphone as both a function of it being user friendly, marketing, hype, and name recognition doesn't mean it will be that way forever. Everyone had a razr at some point too no?

As more and more people are playing games (some study I read said something like 90% of kids play video games, guys and girls), they're going to want newer experiences tailored more to their needs, which means more specialization.

Sure compatibility issues are a problem when dealing with multiple hardware and OS platforms. But that's a job of things like standards to tackle. That doesn't mean you should make nvidia and ATI make virtually the same product. So going back to how this discussion started, I don't think they should require the capacitive screen.

I understand what you're saying about fragmentation, and I agree to some degree. But the standard should have just been multi-touch screen, and not capacitive screen.

A couple of things here.

1. MMOs hardware requirements generally aren't high for 2 reasons

a. To expand the market to more players that can run the game

b. There can be more onscreen interactions happening with hundreds of players on screen. That generally isn't an issue for FPSes, since it's more limited.

2. There are complications with creating a game with both the use of mouse and keyboard and gamepad because of limitations with using the gamepad. Because it's imprecise, developers basically program aimbot into the game. When used with a mouse and keyboard having your cursor snap around isn't a desirable experience. If you take it off for mouse & kbers, the people with controllers have aimbot. Yes, in this case of FPSes, fragmentation causes a pretty big issue. However if you make something that's an MMO on a console which they do (FFIX, Champions and Star trek are both set to come out for xbox), there's no reason not to allow both control medium if there isn't a technical reason like in the case of FPS.

Also there are actually items to make your mouse work on consoles. But it's more a hack than native support. So there's obviously a market for specialization if people are making products for it.

What do you mean? you make multiple sets of controls, or control customization. If you have a BT joystick, then you should be able to set that up. If you want to use multitouch, you set that up, if you want to use the attached dpad and kb you set that up.

It sounds annoying, but that's where game development platforms come in to make that easier for a programmer to worry about game design and less on the details.