This morning, I printed out all of the iTorque purchases for the month of April. Michael, who runs our education sales efforts, found it odd that I was working on what appeared to be an arts and craft project. But this was no art project. I was cutting transaction ids out of a sales report so that I could fill Michael Perry's Yankee's Red Sox hat. He loves the Yankee's Red Sox. Anyways, we filled Michael's hat and pulled out a transaction ID. The winner is BenjaminS, who I suspect has been lurking since '09 but made the commitment and joined the iTorque 2D family with his purchase.

Congrats Benjamin, your iPad is on its way.

We asked Benjamin why he decided to purchase iTorque. He gave us the following statement:

Quote:
...I choose iTorque mostly because I make 2D games.
Using a 3D engine for 2D seems overkill, and probably won't be as optimized.
And iTorque gives me a lot of control over the source code, which is
important for optimization specially on the iPhone.-BenjaminS

iTorque

It was a coincidence that we ran a iTorque promo the same month that Apple created such a stir with their TOS agreement. Having reviewed the TOS, talked with insiders, read the blogs of other vendors, and read Job's latest thoughts, we are feeling safe from the speculation. And if for some reason they change it again, we have contingency plans that we will trigger that would be a distraction, but not a critical road-block.

I actually agree with Jobs on the topic of the potential for middleware to become the least common denominator. I even said so myself a month ago. Maybe Steve reads my comments :) We are working towards converging our products to make it easier to share your work across platforms, but not in a way that will prevent us from taking advantage of each platform's distinct features and optimizations.

I also think that Jobs strengthens our position for the need for source. He talked about how developers are at the mercy of updates that lag platform changes. By providing source, you can take action immediately on your own and control your own blockers, wait for a community forum post, or you can wait for the change in our next version release after it's put through a QA process. The value and low cost option of source is a feature of our products that I can't imagine will ever go away. As Benjamin also points out, if you own the source, you can write your own game specific optimizations in the lowest levels of the engine.

To wrap up, let me again congratulate BenjaminS and all of the others who purchased iTorque 2D. I think you will find it to be a great product. We've seen a lot of success stories in the past and with the distribution of the iPad, I look forward to more.