Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
...must be true, because I can play games on it. I'll just conveniently ignore all the other phones that are more popular.
You forgot blackberry: over 50 million.
Not to mention many hundreds of millions for nokia/ericsson/motorola.
Another example of Apple mod-abuse - the above is not flamebait. If anything, the original article is flamebait, and this response points out why it is misleading: if we are comparing one particular phone manufacturer to games consoles, why not compare other phone manufacturers too, since they can all play games? It comes across as a cheap attempt to make the Iphone look popular, by comparing it, and only it, to a smaller market.
Yes, it's interesting that phones are likely to become more popular as handheld gaming devices than dedicated devices, because most people don't want to carry around a dedicated device. But there's nothing special about the Iphone. And the same may end up being true soon of cameras and mp3 players, anyway.
Does the fact that Nokia's sales of hundreds of millions of phones, that contain cameras, mean that "Nokia Shakes Up the Camera Industry"? That in itself would be absurd enough, but this article is worse - it doesn't say Nokia, it instead picks up a niche-player in the market, and just rides on the pro-Apple hype.
Of course, no doubt I'll be modded down too, as happens with any post that advocates a phone other than the precious Iphone.