The State of Social Gaming On the iPhone

This article at CNet takes a detailed look at the growth of social gaming through Apple's iPhone, a market many developers — and Apple themselves — are still struggling to figure out. The piece also speculates on how such games and networks will continue to evolve. Quoting: "While competition has spawned better features among these services, the future brings a growing need for a more unified network. Even if all these networks begin to become impossible to differentiate, users are eventually going to want a less-disjointed platform when jumping from game to game, and app to app. Thus far Facebook, and even Twitter to some degree have provided that constant, just by giving users a way to log in to these platforms. The unification can shake out in a number of ways though, the most likely of which is consolidation. Open Feint can continue to grow until it's snatched up by a larger company (like Apple). Or it can begin absorbing, or muscling out the other, less popular networks. As mentioned before, Apple plays a big part in this: not only in how it changes the hardware, but also how it continues to evolve the business of the App Store and information sharing between applications."

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Re:Social Gaming

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If you take into account the time aspect, Apple products have become quite affordable. My MacBook Pro certainly did cost more than a generic notebook and most brand products, but it has lasted me longer than most other machines I had. Since a computer is pretty much a constant in my life, "purchase price" really isn't the valid value. "Average cost per year" or something would be, and on that, I dare say the MBP was cheaper than most alternatives.

To add to this: my spouse's Mac laptop lasted eight years, with the only repair being the little rubber feet. I did boost the RAM and hard drive, but since all she needed was e-mail, Microsoft Office, and casual web browsing, it was more than sufficient. We finally called it dead when the backlighting began fading so badly that it was difficult to read.