Adobe Air – Why no low / medium StageQuality?

4T2 have just completed our first game to be distributed via Adobe Air. Flash based Games on your Desktop and Start menu– great!

However, I’ve got to question Adobe’s logic in not supporting low and medium StageQuality in Air. We nearly always make our Flash games in low StageQuality mode (no anti-aliasing) so they run faster. So why would Air not support this? If they want people to develop games for this platform it is a crazy choice.

I’d like to publish every game we ever make in Air so that at the end of the online game you can click on a button to add it to your desktop. This would be an amazing feature as it would definitely increase the number of times our games are played as they pop on and off various homepages. We could also then add some further features to encourage this behaviour. It should be easy…

What is even more annoying is the fact Adobe don’t exactly come forward and announce this fact. The key information can be found on this page. Note the reference to Air 1.0 and then ‘not supported’ later on. Thanks for that!

If anyone from Adobe is reading this, can you put this near the top of your ‘to fix’ list please. It would help us massively. And if anyone knows how to get around this I’d be very grateful.