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."

Comments

Deck chairs on the Titanic

[BadAnalogyGuy]

If you look at the arc of any modern technology, you'll find that gaming typically makes up a very brief interlude between initial takeup and the final settling on a backbone of business usage. So arguing over how gaming will proceed on these new social networks seems futile in the long run.

At this point, if you aren't already making money from social gaming (in whatever capacity), you won't be able to get on board now and make any money from it at all. The gaming stage of technology is short, and it has already passed by for the cellular phone network.

It isn't gaming that people love about their cells, it's the communication aspect. As we pass through the gaming stage of this technology, we're seeing more and more "service-based" features that will make money for service providers and allow users to enhance their money-making abilities through the usage of these new services. The future of every technology is in how it makes business more profitable.

Re:Deck chairs on the Titanic

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a whole generation of software managers and executives, those who spent their managerial "youth" during the rise of Microsoft Windows (and the prosperity that it brought Microsoft), who see creating a "platform" as the sole purpose of software development.

Software for them isn't about satiating the need of any existing consumers or businesses. Rather, it is about providing some abstract "platform" that will become "ubiquitous", and make them "wealthy".

They take this the-platform-is-everything mindset and try to apply it just about everywhere. Any time there's a new technology, you have these fools rushing to become "the platform". Of course 99.99999% of them get nowhere, because this whole idea of providing a "platform" is fucking stupid in the first place.

The minority of software developers who do write software to help others with real problems end up falling victim to these dipshits. We get dragged into their "platform wars", when all we want to do is write applications to help other people or businesses work more efficiently.

Often, the "platform" we are using is irrelevant, because we are using a whole range of higher-level libraries to abstract away these different "platforms"!

Gaming

[haderytn]

Gaming is beginning to mean so much more and yet so much less.

Re:Social Gaming

[I(rispee_I(reme]

...cost-conscious Apple fans...

That's quite the niche market.

oh look five minutes went by

[Anonymous Coward]

must be time for another Apple story.

Re:Social Gaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Not in terms of apps. App buyers for the iPod Touch/iPhone are notoriously price-sensitive, where apps that sell for $20 or more on other phone platforms will be sold for $4.99 on the App store. A few players are toying around with $9.99 price points, but that's still less than half what they'd get elsewhere.

(OT: To top it off, Apple's App store is so painfully bad that it makes sales after the two weeks much tougher to get. I don't understand why Apple is so incompetent in this realm -- even if they don't give a shit about growing discontent from developers (not to mention users) or lost app sales, it's still a huge embarrassment as an Apple-branded portal.)

Re:Social Gaming

[Tom]

Not really, no.

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.

Re:Social Gaming

[Anonymusing]

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.