According to the Programming Guide [1], no persistent data can be stored in the device, everything should be in iCloud, and the maximum size of the Apps is 200MB (at any given point, it seems, you can use on-demand resources)
This is an interesting way of trying to squeeze more apps and circumvent some of the latests storage-related issues in iOS
This actually concerns me, I think 400mb would have been a much more reasonable maximum. We're not going to get a lot of good games if this isn't increased.
Bastion (a 2.5D isometric action RPG) on my iPhone is 1.2GB. Transistor (one of the games they featured) is 1.84GB on the App Store for the iPhone version.
Feels like a disconnect between the docs and reality.
The AppleTV is intended to work as an always-connected device, so apps can reasonably be expected to download the assets as they are needed.
That might be what Apple think, but that certainly isn't what users think. People won't wait 30 seconds for a game to start - they'll just delete the game and buy a different one. If too many games have long load times they'll stop using Apple TV for games altogether. By pitching Apple TV as 'apps in the living room' the competition stops being Netflix and starts being a Playstation.
As far as I understand the on-demand loading, once downloaded assets do not get pruned until the device is under memory pressure. The feature also allows to pre-load assets in the background.
So if the developers do the right job, then that first 200 MB download contains everything for the player to start playing. Then, before those initial assets "run out", the additional stuff will already have been loaded in the background.
Yes. This is going to be difficult for developers, but it's also a valuable skill to be gained because it helps developers to keep their assets organized and their code will be better at dealing with streaming resources, which, in turn will open the doors for many interesting things to do in the future.
We'll see what happens - after all, when you consider a disk size of 32 or 64 GB, then obviously the current limit is purely artificial.
If developers are unable to adapt to the restrictions or if the framework isn't good enough to the point where the end-user experience suffers, then we'll either see the restrictions lifted or the framework improved.
These restrictions don't restrict the type of game you can make, they only make it harder compared to a unlimited initial distribution.
(note however that if the initial download must fit in 200 MB, then the customer experience potentially improves as the time to download 200 MB is naturally much shorter than the time required to download 20GB which is the maximum size an app can currently have).
That way the OS can clear out unnecessary files and they just get downloaded again the next time you play the game. I imagine there is room for temporary video caches etc.
If you loaded the assets over the network on demand then you could get the file size down dramatically. People just expect that when you download a game to your phone or tablet that you'll be able to play offline. Apple TV is stationary though and it's expected to be connected at all times. I bet the core binary would be ~20MB, then you could download and play a level (or a levelsode) every night.
Out of curiosity I went through my Steam folder to look at all the games I have installed. Even many of the 2D ones are well over 200mb - almost all of them are over a gig, most are 2-8 gigs. Some of them are even mobile games, like Republique.
Simple 2D games will probably be just fine with a 200mb limit but pretty much any high tier game is going to have size issues, I think. Hopefully streaming assets down will work out for those games, but there are significant numbers of games for which network streaming is impossible (open-world games, for example, Really Need all their assets on local storage at all times.)
On my Android phone as well I have multiple games up above the 500mb mark, 2d and 3d alike.
no persistent storage sounds really brutal. Does that mean even NSUserDefaults will lose data after a task switch? No save game states if you're offline? What's the point of offering a 64gb model if apps can't store anything?
This is an interesting way of trying to squeeze more apps and circumvent some of the latests storage-related issues in iOS
[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/tvos/document...