QWOP creator reckons iPhone 6 will lead to poorer mobile games

Apple may have bowed to pressure and upped the size of the screen on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, but this may be to the detriment of the games.

That’s according to the creator of QWOP Bennett Foddy who told Polygon that there’s a reason why gaming is more popular on iPhone than Android.

It makes it hard to design games that are really nice to play," he said. "The phones are too big to play in portrait mode, one-handed.

If you look on the Android charts, there are almost no portrait mode games in the top 50. On the iPhone charts, there are many. Portrait mode means you can play on the train, standing in line, walking down the street, but you can’t do that on a big phone, where you’re gripping it hard just to make sure you don’t drop it.

So this is the end of that format of games, a format which many of my favourites — including Flappy Bird, Threes and Spelltower — used.

"The resolution is not such a big deal if the scaling is genuinely high-quality. But you do need to think hard about the fact that the reachable areas of the screen will be different on each model of phone. It just makes it hard to make a tight pairing between the game software and the phone hardware, something that the iPhone used to be really good for."