by David Stone on February 8, 2010
Digital game retailer Green Man Gaming is on the verge of launching a first-of-its-kind trade-in service for video games, and they used Qt to deliver it.
In 2010, large sections of most markets are very comfortable obtaining their purchased content via download rather than buying it on a physical medium like a DVD. But in the gaming industry, this contradicts one of the fundamental parts of the purchasing cycle – trade-ins.
For many gamers, new purchases are funded or offset by taking a few unwanted and unplayed discs into the store and upgrading them into something new. So while downloading games is convenient, you’ve never been able to use downloaded games to fund new purchases.
Until now, that is.
At the end of quarter one 2010, London-based Green Man Gaming will launch a revolutionary service that gives gamers credit for removing (and thus ‘trading’) downloaded games from their system – credit that can be used to purchase new games.
Green Man Gaming’s service will provide around 400 downloadable AND trade-in-able PC titles at launch, with that number to swell to 20,000 by year end.
We spoke with Green Man Gaming and found out some interesting things about what they’re about to launch.
The service will consist of three parts
1. Website
2. Desktop client application
3. Server for client/copyright protection system.
The company has used Qt to build all elements of the desktop client and for a significant amount of the copyright solution.
There were several advantages to using Qt according to Green Man Gaming CTO Lee Packham.
“Our main platform is PC. We picked Qt for a few reasons – speed of development, localization support, QScript, portability and the ease of finding developers,” said Mr Packham.
The company used more than just QtCore and QtGUI. QtWebkit with JsonQt were used for data processing, and they also used QApplication to wrap up their copyright protection solution.
“Our copyright protection is wrapped up in a protected/signed DLL – this was quite challenging as we’ve had to use QApplication in a non-standard way to ensure we can use Qt this way.” said Lee Packham.
It’s an undeniably exciting idea, and we, along with the gaming world, are waiting controller-in-hand to see this first-of-its-kind service go live.
by David Stone on February 4, 2010
We are very excited about today’s Symbian Foundation’s announcement that their transition to open source is complete.
That they were able to complete the task ahead of schedule is a credit to them. It was no small task. The migration of the world’s most widely used mobile platform to the EPL license is the biggest open source migration project ever.
Never before has a platform with such huge scale – over 330 million Symbian devices that have been shipped – been opened up in this way, and the move creates some very exciting opportunities for our own community.
Qt is a great framework for targeting Symbian, so much that Symbian ^4 will be using Qt as the primary runtime. Now our community, along with everyone else, can get innside the platform itself and contribute to its evolution.
Qt’s Community Manager Knut Yrvin spoke today about the significance of Symbian’s milestone.
”Now is the time for developers from the open source community to harness Symbian’s enormous scale to help generate their own Free Software success. For the first time, we can all contribute to the development of the world’s biggest mobile platform,” he said.
“There are tens of thousands of Qt-based applications that can now be ported to Symbian.”
“There is now a great opportunity for developers to make their Free Software applications available on Symbian. This will totally change the user experience on phones with innovative and fun applications,” said Mr Yrvin.
The read the official announcement, check out the Symbian Foundation website.
