I agree -- in games, the important thing is performance, and if that comes at the cost of some portability, so be it. Java''s a nice enough language that it has a wide range of applications in gaming, but some things, like 3D rendering and perhaps the game''s inner loop, are best left to more native languages in the interest of performance. Use the JNI when you need to. At least if you encapsulate the platform-specific code well enough, you can just re-write those segments for other platforms. A really good example of this is JDK 1.3''s new capability of using a native method to paint on a canvas.