Platform Agnosticism

Although our first products will be games for mobile devices, Sunstone Games does not plan to restrict itself to only mobile devices in the future.  In fact, we believe that individual platforms will become less and less significant moving forward.  What's the difference between playing Farmville on my iPhone, vs playing it on my desktop PC?  I can buy essentially the same version of Plants vs Zombies on a dozen different platforms.  Major middleware providers make a point to emphasize multi-platform compatibility.

This is different from the talk about "convergence" which was so popular a few years back - the idea that eventually we would all be using one super platform to do everything in our lives.  We believe that there will still be dedicated consoles, phones, desktops tablets & laptops in the future.  There will always be competition and differentiated hardware brands.

But software is on a different track.  Software is on a path to becoming totally platform agnostic - our same code runs on iPhone and Android devices, for example.  Hardware agnosticism actually facilitates increased competition between hardware providers - because nobody will have an overwhelming advantage in exclusive software.  Yes, there will be exclusives like the Uncharted series on the PS3 - but those will become increasingly rare.

Many of the forces driving this trend are rather surprising - Wi-Fi, for example, is accelerating platform agnosticism by allowing almost every device to remain transparently connected to the internet.  If player data is stored on a server, then client programs on any sort of device can access the same pool of data.  You can play the same game on your phone that you play on your console in the evening.  Not just two ports of the same IP, but literally the same game - thanks to centralized servers and universal IO protocols.

We really want to define a unique space for Sunstone Games, and a big part of that is being able to share our vision and our process with as many people as possible.  We are very fortunate that today people can find the games they want without worrying about the hardware brand they chose to support, or the number and type of devices they are willing to juggle in their lives.