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

[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: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 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.