Saturday, February 06, 2010

Game developers choosing iPod Touch over PSP, DS?

Interesting article on developers starting to prefer iPhone and iPod Touch over Nintendo DS and Sony PSP.

Game Developer Research says 19 percent of handheld game developers are now busy building games for the Apple products, which is more than double the amount for Nintendo DS and PSP developers.

Also the company says handheld games are 25 percent of the gaming market, up 12 percent since the iPhone and iPod touch became serious players.

I think the Apple model works. Customers can download games immediately for their systems. The games are much cheaper than games for the other systems, partly because you don't need packaging or shipping.

Sony has answered with its own downloadable game playing PSP version. I think handheld gaming will continue to head that direction, and sooner than you think, most of the games in GameStop or stores like that will be for home consoles.

And I wonder who'll be first to really push downloadable games at home. It's totally possible now, but of course, it would dry up a huge revenue stream for game companies. It would be nice to just download the Madden 11 update for, say, $9.99 instead of having to spring for a new game at $50 a pop.

Wouldn't it?



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Just because you *can* play games on it doesn't make it a gaming platform. Its good for certain types of games, but I think its a fad. Theres only so much you can do without a physical interface (unless Apple is working on mind control for the next gen ipod).