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iPhone Shakes Up the Video Game Industry
Hugh Pickens writes "Troy Wolverton writes in the Mercury News that in less than a year, the iPhone has become a significant game platform, but its bigger impact could be to help change the way the game industry does business. 'It's got everything you need to be a game changer,' said Neil Young, co-founder and CEO of ngmoco, which develops games solely for the iPhone. With a year under its belt and an installed base of iPhone and iPod Touch owners at around forty million, the iPhone/iPod Touch platform has eclipsed next-gen console penetration numbers and started to catch up to the worldwide penetration of both Sony's (50 million) and Nintendo's (100 million) devices. Wolverton writes that not only is the iPhone one of the first widely successful gaming platforms in which games are completely digitally distributed, but on the iPhone, consumers can find more games updated more often, and at a cheaper cost per game than what they'd find on a typical dedicated game console. While an ordinary top-of-the-line game for Microsoft's Xbox 360 sells for about $60, and one for Nintendo's DS about $30, a top-of-the-line iPhone game typically sells for no more than $10. With traditional games, developers might wait a year or two between major releases; ngmoco is planning on releasing new versions of its games for the iPhone every four to five months. 'You have to think differently,' says Young. 'It's redefining what it means to be a publisher in this world.'"
Thanks to the Zero Attention Span Theater Generation we get vapid video games (as opposed to substantive ones of old) and 15 second "music videos". Now get off my lawn.
As a mobile developer, I cannot deny the strength in numbers of iphone users. That said, I really don't see how any company is making enough money to keep afloat (unless the company is just a handful of people). Also, I'm sure a significant number of people are only using the free apps and using their phone as a phone, rather than as a game console.
Likewise, I very much doubt that a gamer is getting an iphone just so that they can play all of the latest iphone games.
If the company can succeed doing this, great. If people want to buy their games every 5-6 months, wonderful. But it's not shaking up the industry at all.
"a top-of-the-line iPhone game typically sells for no more than $10" That's because the top of the line game on iPhone is no where near comparable to the new games and new ports of those systems
One thing (Sony especially) that other companies need to take note of is the price for these digital only games on the iPod.
Ten dollars or less is a good price range for a game you can't lend or sell. Paying current full retail price for a umd psp game for a digital only download that you can't move off of your system is an idea that isn't going to play out in Sony's favor. The DSi still has a card slot so there's still the illusion that you still will be able to own your games.
What the iPhone needs are FULL SIZE games, not these cheap, quick, and shallow things currently available. There's a lot of arcade style stuff, puzzle style stuff, and very flat approximations of every other genre of game.
In fact, the only games on the iPhone outside of the puzzle/arcade variety that I'd term full-size are Myst and Wolfenstien. That's not to say that the only possible good games on the iPhone are ports of old games, but that if you want to fit a full size game on an iPhone, you need to give up on the super-detailed graphics.
That goes for xBox 360 and PS3 games too, actually. I like to play games, not watch loading screens!
The DSi store is an extension of the Wii's store, which, you know, was out before the iPhone.
Same goes for the PSP.
The games are pretty incomparable. Xbox360/PS3 games are entirely apart from the hand-held games both in terms of graphics and gameplay.
Compared to the DS, iPhone games are terribly shallow and comparable to regular cell phone games. They are designed to be played for 1-2 minutes at a time and not touched again for days. The games have no "continuity" in that they rarely have progression - tending instead to be levels that you can choose from or the same objective over and over again.
I've always found the iPhone games to get boring very quickly both due to the lack of complexity and lack of depth. They've burned me enough times that I'll only download free games, play them a handful of times and move on.
An apt analogy would be comparing internet based flash games to multimillion high budget PC games. Sure they're both "games" but I would be pretty hard pressed to actually consider flash based games what I call "true games," since high budget and flash games have no overlap and usually completely separate audiences (gamers vs non-gamers). In the same sense, iPhone games are the flash game of the hand-held world; I feel the don't really represent any sort of actual competition for "real games," rather serving as a quick time waster when you're bored and you have your phone handy (just think of it as every other phone based game).
As an aside for something I just realized:
The video game market crash of the early 80s was caused by the quantity of poor titles and lack of quality control - eventually driving away costumers who had been burned too many times buying shitty games. Of course, this took years to occur since games were expensive and it took a certain threshold of shitty games before the consumer just gave up.
In this way the digital distribution actually hurts iPhone brand as a gaming machine, because you can reach the point of no longer purchasing games much faster due to ease/low cost of downloading games. You can rack up 5 terrible games in a row within the course of a day/week and swear off purchasing anymore for the 'system.' What took Atari gamers years to realize an iPhone gamer can realize in a matter of days.
Or in my case was about 1 month.
comparing iPhone games to PS3 or XBox360 games is like comparing a gnat to a pterodactyl. Yes they both fly, but one is a beast while the other is a nuisance. This article holds no merit.
There's a joke in here about which one of those has gone extinct...
You forgot the context. Or you're too stupid to understand it.
Am I the only one who's starting to be completely saturated by iPhone stories posted left and right and how it's awesome and shiny and great?
Nope. But the iPhone's not alone. I'm f'n tired of Pre stories around here. I've heard enough about FireFox, too.
I think I've reached the point of hype backlash.
I think that point happened for most ppl here around a year or so ago when a line of people materialized at an Apple store a month before the 3G was announced. Everybody assumed it was people just waiting in line for the new vapor phone. It was believable. Untrue, but believable. Now people spout reasons not to like the phone, regardless of whether they're true or whether or not they really matter. (I cannot cast stones here, really. I did this exact same stuff with the PS3 back when it was announced.)
I bow to the Apple marketing team though. They are doing a truly excellent job. Honestly.
Eh, I personally think it's their product design team. They essentially made the PocketPC we've been wanting since the late 90's. The success of a product with a good web-browser and an ubiquitous internet connetion was inevitable. Both Microsoft and Palm utterly failed to put those two ingredients together. Apple does it, and blammo, everybody can see the potential of it. With potential comes imagination. With imagination comes hype. I think most of the iPhone's hype has come from the people interested in it.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Numbers I got were from March. I didn't watch Apple's conference and couldn't be bothered to look it up.
Either way, my point still stands.
Apple is FAR from the DS, and has NOT positioned its products as game devices.
Hell, they don't even have real buttons.
Apple and the iPhone have become the Chuck Norris of high-tech fashion accessories. There is literally nothing that the iPhone (or Apple generally) cannot do: No industry that the iPhone can fundamentally transform. I have seen articles saying that the iPhone has "transformed" everything from transportation ("it has GPS!!") to interpersonal relationships ("it has a phone!!!") to gaming ("you can play Sudoku!!!!") to education ("You can read books!") to shopping ("you can buy stuff!") to journalism ("it has a camera!").
You name the industry, profession or realm of human activity, and there is an article somewhere that was born in the mind of an Apple publicist or fanboi that explains how the iPhone is going to completely transform it ("there's an app for that!!"). And thank heavens we have media and "news" outlets that are dedicated to spreading the Word about this transformative product.
And each and every one of these articles will have a quote exactly like the one found in this article: "It's redefining what it means to be a publisher in this world."
You are welcome on my lawn.
Development costs:
So for $100, you can make all the iPhone apps you want. Even if you sell them to only 100 people, you can do it easily. With the DS and PSP you have to get official dev kits, get your game approved, find a publisher....
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The problem with that idea is that you're a lot more likely to feel bitter after sinking $60 on a crappy game. If you bought 5 crappy games on an iPhone, and each of them cost anywhere between $0 and $5, you may have lost a total of $10-20.
Most of the games I've purchased for my iPhone range from crappy to mediocore. However, I'll never regret that $.99 on Solebon Solitare, and I won't mourn the $.99 spent on that crappy Zuma clone. It amused me for about an hour, which is not bad for a dollar.
I spend about $10 on iPhone games a month. Most of them get played for a few hours and deleted. They serve their purpose as short-term amusement while waiting in lines or downtime at work. Of course, /. is free, and consumes far more work downtime...
Together, these substantially reduce the marginal costs of, and the psychological barriers to, porting games to Mac OS X. Apple could do a few things to shake the gaming industry up even more.
Those sort of moves might seem unlikely, but might not be all that far fetched. Licensing OSX to a game console maker is even conceivable, since it doesn't present the threat that licensing to clone makers did to the Mac. One such licensing agreement would vault Cocoa to the top gaming platform.
Apple could absorb a few game content providers without smothering the life out of them, as apparently the Microsoft acquisition of Bungie threatened to do, until Bungie managed to burst out of Microsoft screaming, "liberation!"
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
"Apple is FAR from the DS, and has NOT positioned its products as game devices."
I'd also like to add that lower penetration of game consoles one can understand whether or not your cusotmers are *interested* in games themselves. Saying a phone has an installed base greater then consoles isn't something to be proud of if most of your customers don't game on their phones. Just because some people play games on their phones doesn't mean everyone with owns that kind of phone does.