Gaming & Culture —

Former Halo Wars employees leave Microsoft for iPhone gaming

Latest in a growing line of developers shifting their interests to the iPhone …

More and more developers have started to throw money into developing games for the iPhone. Big corporations like EA, THQ, and Square-Enix have slowly been getting on board, and even independent teams are releasing games. Former Microsoft employees Paul Bettner and his brother Dave left the Halo Wars project to create iPhone games with their start-up company, NewToy, becoming the latest talents to throw their support behind the platform.

Paul explained the brothers' decision. "My brother and I quit our jobs working on Halo Wars for Microsoft two months ago," he told Ars. "We quit our jobs because we believe in the iPhone. We believe it has the potential to be as revolutionary to handheld gaming as the original Gameboy was."

Chess With Friends, which runs $4.99, is an asynchronous chess game likened to "text messaging meets gaming" that allows players to play a game of chess over the internet at their leisure much like "chess by email" and other similar asynchronous online games. The company's inaugural title is now live on the App Store.

Ben's thoughts

I get the appeal of the iPhone as a gaming platform. There is a huge market for games. You can create titles relatively quickly and inexpensively, and you get almost total control of your projects. But you leave your development job working on Halo Wars to create... a chess game? 

Does the app store need another chess game? Were the brothers not inspired enough to create a match-three title? I like the fact that this allows a game of chess to be played at any time as players take turns on the board, but I'd love to see something a little more original; creating something unique is the way to stand out among the pages and pages of for-pay and free games on the app store. 

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Channel Ars Technica