Square Enix moves into mobile game development; Steam possibly coming to Android.

[Kabob]

Both taken from Phandroid.

Square Enix Moves into Mobile Game Development with Launch of Hippos Lab
Details are scant at the moment, but the makers behind the highly acclaimed Final Fantasy series of games is looking towards mobile with the launch of Hippos Lab. The new game development studio will have a focus on “high quality original content” for smartphones. This hopefully means more than new ports of old Square games, but we won’t know until their first games are announced. Apparently that could be soon, as the studio has been hard at work since March 7th and plans to have their first title (or at least more info on it) available in the near future.

Steam May Be Coming to Android Soon [Rumor]

Here’s an interesting rumor for you gamers out there. A member over at Valve’s forums has apparently spoken to the studio’s Gabe Newell and said the company head revealed some interesting information. One bit that stood out to us was that the company may be looking to bring an Android version of Steam to the platform.

If you don’t know, Steam is a popular games repository for PC and Mac that acts as a social hub for players, a launcher for all the games you’ve bought (in Steam or otherwise), and has some unique features that third-party developers can take advantage of in their game. (These are called Steam-powered games.)

While we aren’t expecting this supposed mobile version to bring us all the PC goodness we can currently download, we do hope it ushers in a new era of video game discovery on the Android market. OpenFeint is trying and doing very well and NVIDIA has jumped into the fold with their own Tegra Zone application that spotlights games which are optimized for Tegra devices.

The addition of Steam would heighten competition and would bring a very big name in the gaming scene to Android. With all of these tablets and all of the complex-looking and graphically-rich games coming out for them, we can’t hope for anything better to happen. Let’s cross out fingers and hope Steam is indeed working on something.

Head on over to the thread where the bearer of good news claims to have audio and will soon have video confirming this.

 

[SunnyD]

Should be a semicolon between the "development" and "Steam".

 

[Kabob]

Sorry, punctuation isn't my strong suit

 

[runawayprisoner]

Should note that Steam might also be coming to iOS as well as Android.

And Square-Enix easily has more games on iOS than it does for Android...

 

[Pr0d1gy]

I got the Square pack from Steam when they had the deal and it was like 27 games.

 

[Aikouka]

Hopefully somehow Steam will work better than Crystal and OpenFeint. I'm so damned tired of being fleeced by developers to buy an iPad-designed app when I already own an iPhone app (3x the price for slightly bigger sprites?). But this isn't what fully bothers me... the "icing on the cake" is the fact that it is incredibly difficult to transfer saves between separate applications even if they use Crystal or OpenFeint.

If the game is compliant with the iPad and other iOS devices, you can share stats and stuff using the aforementioned services. For example, I have Collision Effect (a cool game, by the way), which is designed for all iOS devices, and I can get a high score on my iPhone, go to my iPad and it will be there when I log in (to Crystal).

They need to allow developers to tie separate but equal games together, or if they do, developers damn well need to start doing it!

 

[monkey333]

Gimme defense grid on iPad...