Quote Originally Posted by WILL View Post
In my opinion, Delphi is a business tool not a game development suite anymore. Maybe before, but money has changed hands and the product has been morphed into more of a business application environment than an all-round general software tool. Not to say it couldn't be used as such and it can continue to be used just as it was, but why would you pay the cost a large business would pay for all those extras you just don't need in game development.
I would say this is true for desktop. However, desktop is losing its market share now to mobiles and huge piracy don't make it a very good development platform. Add Windows 8 fiasco to that, discontinuation of XNA, and new Microsoft policies forcing to buy expensive Visual Studio to allow running DX debugging tools (with the recent Platform Update, you cannot use PIX) - it's a dying market. I think only Macs at this moment are stable, but still, I think they'll be giving terrain to mobiles continuously, with desktop/laptop becoming an elite only / developer-only tools.

On mobile front, Oxygene and Smart Studios are non-native and forgive me for saying that, they are no more useful than any other Java or HTML5 tools out there, even worse because they are not-native to non-native conversion tools (i.e. they are intermediaries). This is the same as Oxygene for .NET: you'd better use C# instead, as it is also a very good language. If I would develop games on non-native, I'd pursue HTML5 directly, but there are only a very limited kind of games you can make with that due to performance limitations, especially on mobile. For that, you *need* to go for XCode. FreePascal barely works on Android and iOS, albeit with RTL bugs and it's a pain in the ass to configure, not to mention that you need to develop everything from scratch, starting from keyboard input to window management, etc.

On a positive side, the incoming Mobile Studio with Delphi for iOS, I think, would be the only native Pascal compiler that can be used in practice for making games on iOS and later for Android (by the way, there is a beta program where you can already try it). I'm not saying that because I'm working with EMBT (in fact, this is a minus, as it's *very* difficult!), but because you can take existing Pascal code, press F9 and see it running on device in less than 2 minutes, and it's *native*. To do the same with FreePascal, it took me 8 hours (the whole day!) to make it work with iOS 6.0 (and forget even about 6.1.2!), and still only a handful of APIs were available, while you're stuck in XCode editor or even console compilation. This is why I've been with EMBT for more than a year now, as without Delphi for Mobiles, I think Pascal has no future there, I myself would abandon it.