Hi,
I don't know any serious games producer who considers Java anything but a comedy item.
Oh RLY? I expected that sort of prejudiced comment... that´s why I had the following link up my sleeve... We were talking mobile...
For desk accessories like angry birds maybe - but its too slow for things like physics engines in "real" games.
Nowadays most talk about "java too slow" is just prejudice and/or obsolete information, from the platform early days.
There are a few benchmarks that shows java fast enough (and actually faster than similar C apps) and there are also a few java game engines for FPS in the market.
I'll leave for the readers to google them. :-)
During the old days of JavaME (pré-smartphones) there were a lot of interactive action games written in Java. Of course this doesn't compare to PC, Playstation and X-Box games.
Most Android games, including someones pretty heavy on phisics, are written in Java, but I guess this doesn't count as they use Android APIs (not portable) and the non-standard Android VM (can't remember the name), not the standard JVM.
The biggest problem for Java in action games are GC pauses. But it looks like they found a way around that. And of course the fact that most Windows games need/use DirectX which isn't availabe on the JVM. But it looks they got nice results using OpenGPL-like APIs and hadware acceleration in more recent JVMs.
Java could be a really nice platform for games, but Sun/Oracle/etc focused on the "EE" edition, the SE/ME editions didn't evolved quick enough to make a real impact on the games and desktop market. :-(
[]s, Fernando Lozano