Gaming on mobile phones is becoming increasingly popular with consumers and could pose a serious threat to hand held gaming devices.
Apple is undoubtedly the leader in mobile phone gaming and now the Apple iPhone has emerged as a serious videogame platform and a major competitor to handheld consoles such as Nintendo’s DS and Sony’s PSP.
“The iPhone is a threat to other portable game platforms,” said Mitch Lasky, a partner with venture capital firm Benchmark Capital, and the former CEO of Jamdat Mobile, “it could be just massive” he said.
We love games, particularly when we can access those games quickly, easily, and whenever we want to. We take our phones everywhere so it makes sense that games accessible from our mobiles are going to pretty popular. Apple obviously knew this.
Gamers have been working furiously to offer games for Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch since the Apple App Store opened only last summer and it’s potentially extremely lucrative for game developers.
There are around 17 million iPhones and 13 million iPod touches already on the market and developers get to keep a whopping 70% of the revenue for their games with Apple getting the rest.
Some of the larger game publishers with offerings for Apple include the likes of Electronic Arts, Glu Mobile and Gameloft.
According to the Director of PR for Gameloft Sanette Chao, Gameloft have made more money selling games for iPhone and iPod Touch in the past 8 months that they have ever made with other mobile carriers. Currently they have 27 games on offer in the App store and have so far sold 2 million games.
“The mobile industry has been waiting for some sort of tipping point…when the App Store was launched, that was the tipping point,” Chao said.
However, the door is also open to other up and coming developers who have yet to make a big name for themselves but they’ll have to fight hard to compete against the 31,000 applications already available on Apple App Store. To succeed they would really need to make it to the top 20 games list so that they are easily found by consumers. Not easy.
Apple will release its new software for iPhone 3.0 later this year which will include game compatible features like peer-to-peer, allowing people to play off against each other. This of course opens up even more doors for games developers.
Yes the future of mobile gaming looks bright.
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Gaming? I do it daily on my ubuntu powered dell mini 9…
what do you use for button’s ?
couldn’t think of anything worse than trying to control 99% of game’s with a G-sensor
Yes, to some degree the comments above are quite right, there is nothing like real buttons in many situations and I sometimes find the touch control on my iPod touch a little less than ideal for a few games. Having said that I think what you gain in versatility makes up for it tenfold. Perhaps it just requires a slightly different way of thinking about gaming but the ability to manipulate games by taping, dragging, shaking, tilting and even blowing
offers some impressive possibilities. I think the only games I find a little difficult to control are some traditional platforms and alike that require a left, right, up and down control though this could be more to do with badly laid out software controls. The tilt sensor works incredibly well for flying and driving games and gives a far more realistic feel than buttons and of course the ability to tap parts of the screen and manipulate objects by dragging offers unrestricted control possibilities. The developer can put buttons wherever they want, but I must say this sometimes results in your thumbs obscuring the action:). I am not a serious gamer and I still cant help thinking that a serious gamer would prefer a dedicated games machine but in my opinion for many people the iPhone/touch offers some really interesting possibilities. I expect part of is appeal/success also has much to do with its vast range of games and apps that can easily be downloaded directly to the device in seconds.