iPhone Gaming Continues To Grow

1Up reports that the popularity of gaming on smartphones is growing, particularly on the iPhone. In fact, gaming on portable devices is growing even at home, where users presumably have access to more powerful platforms. CNN points out that the developer for Trism, one of the first popular games, has raked in over $250,000 in profits through the App Store. Apple exec Bob Borchers and various game developers recently discussed the future of games on the iPhone. "Patrick Gunn, director of marketing for EA Mobile, showcased Need for Speed Undercover, which will be available next month. Gunn says that EA has 'taken full advantage of all of the unique elements ... like touch, flick, accelerometer, and motion sensitivity' — and graphically, the game appears to be roughly on par with a PSP title."

Comments

Sorry Apple

[nawcom]

I'm not getting an iPhone until I know Frontal Assault has been ported. Until then, eat my shorts Steve!

I'm not suprised its "growing" faster

[deft]

I'm not suprised its "growing" faster ...because at the home gaming has been around for years and is highly saturated, popular, and is now just pushing out slowly after its major strides.

Smartphone gaming is new, and has everywhere to go now, being pretty darn new.

If phone gaming can approach at home gaming, then that will be news.

Re:I'm not suprised its "growing" faster

[renegadesx]

Exactly, mobile phone gaming was very cheap and flimsy until very recently, now we are seeing phones that can churn out some ok visuals.

Last gen you had the PS2 alone rack up over 140 Million units, then the Gamecube and Xbox racking about 24 Million each plus Gameboy Advance.

The N-Gage had alot of potential but was held back by design issues like taco looking side talking, game slot underneath the battery and screen taller than it was wide. Otherwise if you had a phone more like shaped more like GameBoy Micro with a retractable numeric keypad you would have a winner.

The iPhone has a real chance to succeed where the N-Gage failed, but it hasn't succeeded yet.

Re:I'm not suprised its "growing" faster

[Graff]

The iphone doesn't have hardware buttons.
It sucks for most games as a result.
Tactile feedback is a must for most games.

Actually, it doesn't suck and it's not a must when you are talking about games on the iPhone.

You need tactile feedback when you are looking at a screen and your hands are not in view. If you are playing on an Xbox, computer, or a similar device then tactile feedback is important because it's incredibly difficult to watch both the screen and your hands at the same time.

Playing a game on an iPhone is very different since your input device and the screen is the same object. You can easily see exactly where you are putting your fingers and still follow the game action. Not only that but since a lot of games involve tilting and moving the iPhone you do get tactile feedback, albeit a different kind of feedback from how a button would feel. Many games are also taking advantage of the vibrate feature of the iPhone to provide tactile feedback.

There are tons of cool, fun, and definitely viable games that thrive on the iPhone despite the lack of physical buttons. It's a completely different gaming experience and the old saw of tactile feedback being necessary for games just doesn't apply.

Re:I'm not suprised its "growing" faster

[Dan East]

The iPhone comes out, and suddenly everyone forgets that touch-screen devices of the exact same form factor have been around for over a decade. All of this has been hashed and rehashed. I ported Wolfenstein 3D, Quake 1 & 2, and a Gameboy emulator to Pocket PC, as well as doing extensive game development on new projects. For analog input, touchscreens are okay. However for binary input, aka fire / jump buttons, d-pad, etc, it sucks tremendously. I think you're confusing "tactile feedback" for "knowing where the virtual button is". It's not just about knowing where to hold your thumbs, but knowing that you've pressed the button hard enough to trigger it. The very first ARM Pocket PC, the Compaq iPaq, which had the horsepower and RAM to do some serious gaming (like run Quake), had a terrible design flaw. The D-Pad and 4 hardware buttons all resided on a daughterboard with its own microcontroller. Some bone-headed engineer had a serious lack of foresight, and the hardware was designed such that only one switch could register at a time. Thus if you were holding the D-Pad in a direction, then none of the 4 hardware buttons would register.

So the only solution to make things like Gameboy emulators playable was to throw virtual A and B buttons up on the screen. These were of course huge, so finding them wasn't a problem. However I can tell you that playing games like that, without real tactile response, sucks, sucks, sucks.

There's a reason that the Timex Sinclair's membrane keyboard didn't catch on back in the 80s, and why to this day people like the big IBM keyboards that you can hear click half way across the room when a button is pressed.

Re:I'm not suprised its "growing" faster

[Graff]

The iPhone comes out, and suddenly everyone forgets that touch-screen devices of the exact same form factor have been around for over a decade. All of this has been hashed and rehashed. I ported Wolfenstein 3D, Quake 1 & 2, and a Gameboy emulator to Pocket PC, as well as doing extensive game development on new projects. For analog input, touchscreens are okay. However for binary input, aka fire / jump buttons, d-pad, etc, it sucks tremendously. I think you're confusing "tactile feedback" for "knowing where the virtual button is". It's not just about knowing where to hold your thumbs, but knowing that you've pressed the button hard enough to trigger it.

First of all, the iPhone uses a capacitive touchscreen. This means that next to no pressure is needed to press a virtual button so there is very little need for feedback when you press a virtual button. The iPhone's screen is also multi-touch and has a high touch resolution and it can accurately measure the size and shape of the areas pressed.

Secondly, the algorithms that the iPhone uses to measure where you pressed are very advanced. The iPhone puts all this additional data to good use and it can accurately predict where you pressed and even how hard based on the size of the pressed area (your finger spreads out more if you press harder).

All of this means that the iPhone is a ton more responsive and forgiving with input via touchscreen when compared to past touchscreen input devices. Give it a try, games on the iPhone work very well without needing much tactile feedback.

Sure...

[Quantos]

Gaming grows, but when is the breakthrough in battery life gonna hit?

Why do people want to do things with a PHONE that will make it so that they can't use it as a PHONE?

Hang on, I was playing a game and my batteries dying.
How often have we all heard that one.

Re:Sure...

[Paradigm_Complex]

Why do people want to do things with a PHONE that will make it so that they can't use it as a PHONE?

You've seriously never had a situation where you were idling, wishing you brought a book? Say, waiting at a dentist's office or during a 45min break between classes because of scheduling issues?

Having entertainment on-hand can be pretty damn useful, even if it comes at the cost of limiting the phone's usefulness before the next charge. Pre-smartphone I did my best to keep a book on my person 24/7, but now I can just pull out my blackberry and browse slashdot et al, even though that eats into my battery pretty quick.

Re:CNN's article reads like Apple propaganda

[jcnnghm]

The problem with free software zealots, such as yourself, is that you have no concept of business. The only thing you're accounting for is the download distribution cost. What about the equipment that Demeter used, the opportunity cost, the training and experience. None of those things are free.

You also don't understand the concept of risk. Demeter's application could have never been approved for sale, his concept could have proven to be boring, or he may not have been able to promote it. If any of those things happened, Demeter wouldn't make any money. If I'm going to invest $10,000 in a project that has only a 10% chance of succeeding, if it does succeed I need to be able to generate revenues of at least $100k just to cover the cost. There is no way that I would give an iPhone app even a 10% risk assessment, that's way too generous, considering all the potential risk factors.

Re:CNN's article reads like Apple propaganda

[jcnnghm]

So 0 times 1 is $0.01, times 500 is $5, ergo there is a 500x markup. You really are a moron. It's not about the cost to duplicate, it's about the cost to produce.

Re:CNN's article reads like Apple propaganda

[abigor]

Fair enough. But in the meantime, hats off to him for making a bundle.

Come to think of it, the "alternative business model" could simply be the App Store itself. It's convenient and easy for any non-technical person to buy stuff there very cheaply. Maybe it's simply worth paying the five bucks for the sheer convenience of it all. I mean really, five dollars? It's just not worth it to look for the app elsewhere. It's not like he's charging $100 for the thing.

Anyway, it's here to stay until market forces say otherwise. Your argument boils down to "it's ethically wrong to make money from artificial scarcity", but the market doesn't care about your personal ethics.

And anyway, it's certainly not unethical to charge very little for a lot of convenience, which is what's happened here. People pay five dollars and have a lot of fun; the author makes a decent bundle and puts a down payment on a house. Everyone wins.

Re:CNN's article reads like Apple propaganda

[jcnnghm]

So a company spends 4 years and $100M to hire a team of 1,000, provide them with office space, equipment, and resources, and you believe that all they should be able to charge for the game is the cost to press the disks. You're either a troll or hilariously naive. And do tell where you can higher people to mow lawns for $5 an hour, the companies here cost much closer to $25 to cover the cost of the equipment, trucks, staff, profit, and management. Perhaps you'll understand the real world a little better when you have some bills to pay and are on your own.

Re:CNN's article reads like Apple propaganda

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Yeah, sure, compared to the ludicrousness of consoles. But how about PCs? Or even Mac OS X on anything other than an iPhone? The barrier to entry on any of those platforms is zero.

On the PC or Mac there are costs for any practical, commercial venture. You need to pay for hosting the downloads, processing payments, and marketing the product. All of these can be done on the cheap, but you're not going to pull in $250K in a couple of months that way. The iPhone cost a hundred bucks to put an application up, but then it is in front of all the users and the download costs and payment processing is taken care of. It's a decent cost proposition in comparison to shareware on the Web, for example, and easier for many developers than trying to manage all those admin and marketing details.

I continue to be astonished by how people consider getting rich off of digital downloads to be at all a good thing. I respectfully submit that anyone who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few months of work "in their spare time" is being grossly overpaid.

That's capitalism. You don't honestly think most CEOs making a thousand times what their median employee does works that much harder to earn that money do you? The difference here that catches people's attention is the opportunity for the little guy to make it big, something becoming more and more scarce in our current economy.

And when you really think about it, paying any price for a digital download is simply price gouging anyway, since the cost of reproduction is zero.

But the development cost is not. Some of us have heard of this newfangled idea called "copyright" that allows people to create novel works without being paid in advance and profit from a (theoretically) limited monopoly on distribution of that work.

That means at $5, Trism is marked up 500 times.

Umm, interesting math.

Re:CNN's article reads like Apple propaganda

[dougisfunny]

End Price - Cost To Acquire - Cost to Stock - Cost To Distribute

You are making the assumption that cost to stock and distribute are ~0; I won't argue that, since I don't know what it costs to run the store selling the App, and Tax et al. Interesting that you ignore the 'cost to acquire' since its fixed and you only have to pay that once in this case (ignoring maintenance and support) but it is still notable.

It's kind of like you're talking about the efficiency of an algorithm, constants are always ignored.

O(n) = 1 being the business model.

That's a great algorithm right? Oh, forgot the constant c, which is 10^238.

Just because there is a fixed front end costs doesn't mean that there is no cost, or that it is not valid.

Re:CNN's article reads like Apple propaganda

[Richard_at_work]

And you are ignoring the physical resources expended in the production of Trism - time, energy (heating, electricity), overheads (rent, hardware costs) etc.

You are blissfully ignoring all of those things in your own argument - Trism didn't just 'appear' out of thin air, just as the burger didn't appear out of thin air.

Production costs are a lot more than the very last step of actual distribution.

Re:CNN's article reads like Apple propaganda

[ShadeOfBlue]

You're absolutely right that it is not our responsibility to subsidize obsolete business models. However, if you don't want to subsidize a business model, then buy from competing business models or don't use products from that market at all.

Piracy is not a competing business model, it's just piracy. Just because a business model is obsolete doesn't make it ethical to do whatever the hell you want. You don't walk up to a newspaper stand, say "hey look, the Free Times right over there pays for itself with just advertisements" and then steal a copy of the New York Times while feeling all smug.

I think people have taken the music industry example and run too far with it. With the music industry there were/are legitimate concerns that the giants in the RIAA were fixing prices, intentionally squashing competition, and using the artists' popularity to further entrench themselves in the recording industry rather than paying a fair share back to the content creator.

In this case, however, the content creator is getting his cut. If you don't feel his content is worth his price, just don't use it.

Re:CNN's article reads like Apple propaganda

[Lars T.]

I've addressed that argument here. And ad hominems are immature.

So is repeating the same stupid argument over and over again.

Re:CNN's article reads like Apple propaganda

[randyest]

You're misinformed. The SDK is free to download and use. It's only $100 to publish a game on the app store.