By Kristin Kalning
Games editor
MSNBC
updated 7:48 a.m. CT, Fri., March. 14, 2008
Last week, Apple got into the mobile-game business.
The company, which projects it will sell 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008, is trying to make it easier for third-party developers to make cool stuff for the sleek, sexy devices. More cool stuff, more phones sold. And a key part of that effort, it seems, is games.
Electronic Arts showed off an iPhone-specific version of Spore during last weeks presentation. The game, easily one of the most anticipated titles of the year, is the brainchild of Sims creator Will Wright. And Sega demonstrated a few minutes of Super Monkey Ball, which makes use of the iPhones accelerometer, motion-detecting sensors that work much like the Wii remote.
Thats all very cool and certainly exciting for a sector of the game industry thats not exactly setting the world on fire. Despite the fact that everyone has a cell phone, only a small percentage of users have actually bought a cell-phone game. Can the iPhone change all that?
There seems to be an enthusiasm around (the iPhone) that Ive never seen for a particular device model, says Mark Donovan, senior analyst with M:Metrics. What were hearing out of the game community is that theyre viewing this as much closer to a console platform than your typical mobile handset platform.
Thats an important distinction. Mobile phones are for making phone calls. The user interface for your average cell phone has a small screen and a keypad for punching in numbers and letters. Not exactly an ideal gaming device. No wonder the most popular cell-phone games have been tried-and-true fare like Tetris and Solitaire.
But the iPhone has a 3-D processor and graphic capabilities that far surpass those of other mobile phones. It has a 3.5-inch widescreen display that makes it look more like Sonys PSP than a RAZR. No keyboard, and only one button. Its really a blank canvas, says Travis Boatman, vice president of Worldwide Studios for EA Mobile.
With a blank canvas, I can create any kind of interface I want, to make any kind of game experience I want, he says.
If its predecessors are any indication, theres a huge audience for portable gaming devices. Who among us didnt own some flavor of the Nintendo Game Boy? Its successor, the Nintendo DS, was the top-selling game machine in 2007 besting the Wii, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. And Sonys PSP is a gorgeous little gadget that can play games, music and video. The iPhone has all that and it makes phone calls.
The release of the 2.0 software in late June will also contain something Apple is calling the App Store, an application that lets users browse, search, buy and download programs like games. It will look a lot like iTunes, an interface already used by millions of people.
The App Store will also let developers deliver applications to iPhone users. The iPhone software development kit download is free, App Store-inclusion is$99 a year for developers, who set the price for their applications, and get to keep 70 percent of all sales revenues.
The App Store for the iPhone certainly will help level the playing field a little bit, especially for smaller developers, to get their titles into peoples hands, says Peter Cohen, editor and game columnist for Macworld Magazine. Of the developers that Ive spoken to about game development for the iPhone, thats where theyre most excited.
Game developers havent always felt the love from Apple. Cohen says that game-makers interested in creating titles for the Mac have met with indifference or a lack of support from the company.
There really hasnt been a concerted effort to get Mac gaming on the same level of parity as PC gaming or console gaming, he says. Its always been sort of an afterthought.
It wasnt always this way, says Brian Greenstone, owner of Pangea Software, which makes Mac titles like Enigmo and Bugdom. About a dozen years ago, Mac was the platform for gaming. Apple went out of its way to encourage small developers in creating unique titles. But Greenstone says that as the personnel changed at Apple, so did the interest level in games.
It was impossible to get anyone to listen to you, unless you were doing a gigantic, triple-A title that already existed on other platforms, he says.
Greenstone is thrilled at Apples newfound interest in games for the iPhone which he believes is driven mostly by dollars.
You dont really do useful work on a cell phone, but you can do games. I think they realize that thats where the money is, he says.
So Pangea, which had slowed down its development for the Mac, is hard at work, hoping to get its Enigmo title ported over to the iPhone in time for the 2.0 release.
I definitely think thats where the money is, without a doubt. I wouldnt even consider doing anything but a game for the iPhone, he says.
Despite all the buzz, and the excitement from game developers, its unlikely that the iPhone will dramatically reverse the fortunes of the overall mobile-game industry at least initially.
I wouldnt expect that the iPhone is going to have any lateral impact on the rest of the game market, says M:Metrics Donovan. But the iPhone has been a really disruptive device that I think has raised the bar and is sparking a lot of innovation and openness.
