When Apple announced that it would be allowing games on the iPod last week, pieces fell into place. The company had been looking for game developers and had even hired LucasArts’s former technical director to oversee a top secret project. For a company whose relationship with gaming was more miss than hit (see Part I), games on the iPod seemed a strange route to go. But the lure of charging $5 a pop via iTS was, I think, too hard to pass up.
In our post of the announcement, I wondered “If Apple’s allowing downloadable games, it’s only going to be a matter of time before someone figures out how to run an arbitrary program on the iPod. Could this be good news for the homebrew community? I think so.”
Since then, details have emerged that running self-created games and other programs on the iPod may be fairly difficult. So what the heck is Apple up to? Will the iPod salvage Apple’s reputation, or is it merely wishful thinking on our parts? Let’s dive deeper.
Despite it being less than a week since iPod games were announced, there’s been a lot written on the subject already. Within a day or two, curious individuals had discovered that the .IPG (iPod Game) files Apple disseminates are nothing more than .ZIP archives. Inside you can find resources used in the game, like sounds and graphics, as well as a manifest that contains information on every file in the archive. Apple’s used some seriously paranoid accounting techniques here, providing a authentication digest for each file, a unique string that’s related to the contents of the file. Change the file and the digest no longer matches; presumably, the game no longer runs. Likewise, the manifest itself has a security certificate which means you can’t just change the manifest without generating a new Apple-signed certificate.
Given these discoveries, blogger Dan Dickinson wrote that “Homebrew is probably an impossibility at this point because of the expectation of a signed [security certificate] from Apple.”
While these are challenges, I don’t believe that they’re insurmountable. At best, the security on games is obfuscated by Apple, but in order for content to be read it must be decrypted at some point. This is the same reason that people keep cracking the DRM on iTunes’s music files.
More worrying than the technology used to lock the games down is Apple’s policy of locking games down. Sure, there are a number of legitimate reasons Apple might want to remain the only provider of iPod games: making sure, for example, that inappropriate games don’t appear on the iPod, or ensuring a certain level of quality among offerings. Possibly even to prevent malicious programs from being introduced into the iPod environment. Or maybe, just maybe, they’re just enjoying the revenue stream that $5 a game is going to bring them.
None of these reasons are really good enough, if you ask me. In the first part of this piece, I quoted Daring Fireball’s John Gruber saying that Steve Jobs didn’t seem to be very interested in iPod games, a theory I expanded upon to suggest that Jobs isn’t very interested in gaming at all. And I think that’s the reason that Apple’s locking down iPod gaming. Which explains why, when programmer and blogger Ben Sinclair approached Apple about developing iPod games he was told “Please know that, at this time, we have no plans to offer an SDK [Software Development Kit] for the iPod.” It seems to me as if Apple simply doesn’t want to spend the time dealing with people developing games for the iPod.
Now, over in the portable gaming sphere, Sony’s been having a long back and forth with people developing homebrew games for the PlayStation Portable. The company will update the firmware, which will break existing homebrew content. Then the community will either figure out a way around the lockdown or, alternatively, downgrade their firmware so they can still run existing homebrew apps. I predict that this is the road Apple’s heading down if they continue to lock down the iPod. Because, mark my words, someone will get an arbitrary application running on the iPod. It’s only a matter of time. I’ve learned never to bet against human ingenuity.
As Daniel Eran at Roughly Drafted has pointed out, the iPod doesn’t handle authentication for movies or music; that responsibility is entirely in iTunes, which is why you can play music you’ve bought from the iTunes Store on an unlimited number of iPods. Whether the same is true for games or not, we don’t know yet. But sooner or later, someone will figure it out.
Allowing developers to write programs for the iPod could actually be less trouble in the long run. At least, that way, Apple can keep tabs on development in the same way they do with the Mac. As it is, the homebrew community has just begun to mobilize (the iPodlinux site is hosting a wiki page to keep track of developments). I’d estimate we could be seeing homebrew applications within the month. And once the cat’s out of the bag, it’s going to be Apple playing catch-up with firmware updates.
Of course, as I’m obliged to mention, I could be wrong about any number of things suggested herein. Apple may be holding onto the SDK for the moment, but with the intent upon releasing it at some point. Perhaps they’re investigating deals with other game-makers. Or maybe hacking a game to work is going to be harder than I’ve predicted. And who knows how interested people are in playing games are their iPods at all? The point is, Apple has a long way to go in engendering goodwill in gamers, and they don’t exactly seem to be heading down the right track at the moment. Still, all that can change in the blink of an “i.”
