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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.'"
'It's got everything you need to be a game changer,' said Neil Young
Young went on to say that the iPhone "keeps him searching for a game of gold" and went on to speak of the coming mobile console war:
There's fanboi lines bein' drawn
A-nobody's right if everybody's wrong
Young people spendin' their dimes
A-iPhone sales leavin' others far behind
My work here is dung.
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.
The only place where you can measure the rate of iPhone stories in hertz and get an integer.
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
considered games on a cell phone before. While some of my phones have supported games I wasn't interested. That is until I saw the iPhone commercials. Now an iPhone 3GS is on this years' xmas list. :)
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.
I swear it's like the damn thing is going to save the world. Even for nerds there must be other topics of conversation, right?
I think I've reached the point of hype backlash. I might have been somewhat interested in the iPhone at the beginning, but now I'm just tired of seeing it everywhere.
I bow to the Apple marketing team though. They are doing a truly excellent job. Honestly.
As an avid iPod touch user (and iPhone if Apple ever gets one onto Verizon . . .), I must say that the vast majority of the games I've seen for the platform is just too gimmicky. The system has plenty horsepower for simple stuff that might be a good diversion (think Pacman, Asteroids, Space Invaders - or even some more powerful stuff - I recently downloaded Myst for my iPod), but the touch screen interface is just terrible for gaming purposes.
I just don't see it cutting into Gameboy sales that much. On the other hand as an APPLICATION platform the little bugger is amazing. Sure it's an "iPod" suggesting music player (which is does indeed do, and do well), but my iPod touch is about the best damned PDA I've ever used. There are apps for everything I need, and much unlike most cell phone browsers of old (including the one on the Blackberry Curve that I have for work), the included version of Safari actually works for almost any site I want to visit. I might have to zoom in/out to see some things, but I can use the page at least.
To tell the truth mine has replaced 95% of what I would use a laptop for. My laptop now has become truly a "portable computer" like the old ones that you just lugged around. I'll take it on a trip to use in the hotel room, but for when I'm actually out and about, in a coffee shop, etc, the iPod is smaller, lighter, and is always with me. Battery life is great too.
All in all I truly do see them as revolutionary devices, just not so much on the gaming front.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Really, I have yet to see an iPhone game that captured my attention for more than an hour or two -- even the recent version of the Sims for the iPhone is a very stripped down version of the real game. A DS or full fledged console or computer game may cost $30 or more but I expect I'll get at least 50 hours of enjoyment out of it....
While I applaud the growing market for games of the complexity and graphic resolution of twenty years ago, I am holding off from buying an iPhone until someone develops an app which monitors the motion sensors and battery level and bills me every time i charge up the phone or take it out of my pocket, and maybe it could bill me every time I change from one cell reception area to the next.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
What people play on the iphone are time-passers. Mere distractions.
While the platform is certainly selling these time passing distraction apps, I don't believe I'll call it a serious games platform.
Business goes where the money is. Sometimes the money is in wasting your time.
They're using their grammar skills there.
This is silly; mobile devices and "full size" gaming systems have to be considered different markets.
I can write documents on my iPhone, but that doesn't mean I won't be buying word processing software for computers any more.
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 article seems to be more hype than anything else, but it does hit on a couple of good points.
Yes, the iPhone platform has shaken up the industry, due to the digital distribution of games. This has a lot to do with timing (you need oodles of cheap flash memory for this) but it also builds on the fundamentals of how the iTunes store has built up over the years. It's clearly proven that digital distribution of games can be viable, and you're going to see a lot of this in the future. Both to sell games that would never be viable retail releases due to pricing (micro transactions come to gaming), and because everyone wants to cut Gamestop out of the loop.
And no, the iPhone platform has not shaken up the industry, due to hardware designs. The hardware is fundamentally that of a phone. The processor is overpowered and the GPU is underpowered for gaming, and the whole thing eats too much power when you ramp up the *PUs. The DS gets something ungodly (10+ hours) and even the PSP can do 5+ hours with its better graphics. The controls are also lacking - a touch screen is good for some things (e.g. Solitaire) and bad for others (e.g. Super Mario Brothers). iPhoneOS 3.0 will allow what amounts to button caddies, but since buttons aren't standard they can't be counted on. The hardware means it's an additional avenue for gaming, but it's not necessarily a threat to traditional handhelds like the DS/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).
I don't own any of these devices, but how do these games compare? Is a top-of-the-line iPhone game as cool or complex as a top-of-the-line DS game? Isn't it a different kind of game -- certainly a different game experience?
I played Cooking Mama lite on the iPhone and couldn't really tell a difference between it and the DS version. Same for the "My Little Pony" ports.
What? Why is everyone looking at me?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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...
...and I'm not being sarcastic, if my 11 year old son is any indication of what is happening around the country.
He saved all his birthday, christmas and allowance money for months to buy an iPod touch and spends way
too much time playing games on it. Most of the games are free or only cost a couple of bucks, meaning he
can get near-instant gratification without having to save $50 to buy a console game. He uses it almost
exclusively as a game platform, even to the point of using a clunky old mp3 player for music, in order to save the
iPod touch battery for game play.
The iphone is so limited as a game platform it's silly to try to compare it. The touch screen does work well for some kinds of games, but it's an absolutely horrid interface for a lot of others.
Shooters do not work well with the touch interface. Racing games do not work well with the touch interface. Sports games do not work well with the touch interface. Platformers do not work well with the touch interface. Right there, you've accounted for (conservative estimate) more than half of the game market. The iphone/touch is great at what it does, but it isn't very good as a portable game system. People are still better off getting a DS or PSP if they want that kind of thing, because let's face it. Having a lot of games doesn't mean you have a lot of good games that have interfaces which are implemented well.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
The only complain I have about iPhone games is the big guy who sat in the middle seat on the plane and excitedly played one of those tilt-sensitive race car games all flight. I was elbowed a thousand times. Other than that iPhone games are pretty neat.
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.
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.
If I were Nintendo, I'd be tired of all the "wee" jokes by now. They should name their iPhone-fighter the "Portable Nintendo Entertainment System" to avoid any such innuendo!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Objective C is used to build the apps on the iPhone. Sure, some developers might elect to use some C or C++ code, particularly if they have a mountain of it they are porting, but there is a lot of Objective C running on the phone, even in games, and it's... snappy!
The platform and tools are OSX and XCode, and are not available on other platforms, hitherto frequently derided as being either insufficient or insufficiently "open" by developers with an interest in multiple platforms, and certainly not considered to be "pretty standard".
The types of games include FPS and highly graphics oriented games, some of them derived from "regular/bigger" projects.
If there's anything "slow" hereabouts, it's probably not Objective C.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Yes, those flash cards are illegal for various reasons. They violate the DMCA for one. But if you're using it simply to run unsigned code you put together to create a demo to show Nintendo as you apply to be a developer, it's not going to be an issue.
You start your business.
legalzoom.com
You have an actual office (this is a specific requirement for Nintendo, MS and Sony don't have this requirement as far as I know).
mrofficespace.com
You make games for various platforms. DS homebrew, PC, java, flash, whatever. You build a body of work. Nothing has to be published, you just have to show that you're not an internet asshate who want's to get their hands on a dev kit.
You apply.
I'm assuming you dont have an iPhone etc and are interested in one? I'll give you a beginners FAQ about the games, they are all quite short sadly, sad is the right word for me, I imagine what the iPhone could do with a full game with levels and quests etc. You know what I think would KICK ASS on the iPhone? Pokemon type games, I really can imagine that taking off, I remember playing Pokemon Yellow when I was little, and that was basically the best game ever! I still remember the items, etc. I guess it was like Zelda for another generation. I think a Pokemon style game could work very well on an iPhone or iTouch, using wifi for multiplayer, swapping items and working together....playing over the internet....
Overall iPhone games are about Playstation 1, with a few good ones that are PS2 quality. Many games have "cheap" feelings to them, and basically none have a great story that takes days to beat. Most of the time, you have to do something involving tapping, dragging, tilting, and each level gives you more items to work with, and less time etc.
The iPhone could do so much more, I'm thinking of RPG type games with multiplayer. The graphics could be summed up as PS2 I guess, if people put in the time I think PS2 is reasonable to think of as the average iPhone graphic quality. But, its so much more, with the wifi, motion controls, multi touch etc, its so much more than JUST a old PS2.
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