Booming mobile gaming market to be developed

In addition to smart phones to send and receive Internet e-mail, telephone contact, the researchers found that the most popular smartphone features other games for killing time. Apple Store has just more than 50,000 kinds of games for iphone, itouch users downloaded more than 1,000,000 times the number of apple store downloaded programs, more than half of all downloadable games. Researchers found that 79% of iphone users have downloaded games, compared to other smart phones, only 31% of users had downloaded the game obviously much higher.

IPhone shakes up the video game industry

Several well-known video game industry such as Electronic Arts, but also gradually introduced in the iphone or the implementation of the popular game itouct version of the provision of pay-per-download, video games attack smartphone market. In addition to video game manufacturers, there are also many personal development puzzle game sold in the Apple Store provided. The researchers said that, iphone and itouch have begun to Sony PSP, Nintendo NDSL game console, such as hands, especially in the more simple to use without the complexity of the game type of support that would strike a blow.

Yet Another Vogue for the iPhone: Video Games
The iPhone has sent rivals scrambling, first to duplicate its glassy touch screen, then its successful mobile application storefront.

Now it is the video game industry that is sitting up and taking notice. Playing games, it turns out, is one of the most popular things to do with an iPhone. Of the 50,000 programs available for the iPhone and iPod Touch through Apple’s App Store, games are the largest category, about 20 percent of the offerings, according to the mobile analytics and advertising company Mobclix. The company also said that more than half of the billion downloads from the App Store are games.

That plethora of games, most of which are free or cost as little as 99 cents, are available in seconds via wireless download, which is driving the expansion of the audience for mobile gaming, said Tuong H. Nguyen, an analyst with Gartner Research who tracks the industry.

“Like many other features of the iPhone, it introduced the possibility of gaming on your phone to a whole new group of consumers,” Mr. Nguyen said.

playing a video game on iPhone

Called casual gamers, these people who play a game for a few minutes here or there are a sought-after group by a video-game industry searching for growth. Sylvia Martinez, a 52-year-old educator living in Los Angeles, is one of them. Mrs. Martinez, who owns a 3G iPhone, said she had never played games on her cellphone before she bought the iPhone. “With older phones, the games were so hard to play,“ she said. “With the iPhone, everything works so well.“

Now there are several games that she plays at least once or twice a day, she said. “It suits my time frame,” she said. “I don’t have an hour to play; I have five minutes.”

Greg Joswiak, head of marketing for the iPhone and iPod, said, “This is the future of gaming.” The company has emphasized iPhone gaming in several television commercials. At the press conference in early June where the iPhone 3G S was introduced, the company ran a long video featuring testimonials from game developers. The company also trotted out several companies on stage to demonstrate games that made use of the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system.

The popularity of gaming among iPhone users — some 79 percent of all iPhone owners have downloaded games, compared with 31 percent of smartphone users in general, according to data from the Web analytics firm Compete — has game publishers flocking to get their titles on the platform.

One of them is Electronic Arts, the giant maker of boxed software for PCs and game consoles like Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation3. “We knew it would be big,“ said Adam Sussman, vice president for worldwide publishing for the mobile division of Electronic Arts. “We knew we had to scramble and invest more on the iPhone.“

The built-in audience, which amounts to more than 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch owners, adds to the platform’s allure, said Mr. Sussman, who has overseen the translation of some of E.A.’s bigger franchises to the iPhone, including the Sims 3 and Tiger Woods PGA Tour.

The iPhone has already increased revenue at the French game developer Gameloft, which publishes games across a variety of platforms including the hand-held Sony PlayStation Portable and Nintendo’s DSi, in addition to the iPhone and iPod Touch. The company said that 15 percent of its sales were from iPhone games during the first quarter of 2009. It anticipates sales from the iPhone to top $20 million this year.

Some experts say that the big-name titles available for the devices are further evidence that larger game studios are taking the platform as seriously as other portable gaming devices like the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP.

It does not require a budget backed by a publishing giant like Electronic Arts or Sega to churn out a successful game for the iPhone. The low technical barrier to publishing games in the App Store means that anyone with programming skills and a laptop can try their luck at it.

Indeed, many of the App Store successes were born of a clever idea from a single coder or produced by small independent teams like Firemint.

Firemint, an Australian mobile development team, is behind Flight Control, a simple yet addictive game that challenges players to guide aircraft to landing strips. “When my mother-in-law couldn’t stop playing it, I knew we had a success on our hands,” said Robert Murray, company founder. Since Flight Control went on sale in early March, the game has sold a million copies and hovered in the top ranking spots on iTunes, said Mr. Murray.

Gamers spend about 30 minutes playing some of the more polished games, said Krishna Subramanian, a co-founder of Mobclix.

“That level of gameplay is really starting to bite into the gaming market occupied by the PSP and DS,” he said.

Al de Leon, a spokesman for Sony, said the company recognized there was an appetite among their audience for direct access to software and more of it. In October, the company plans to release a new version of its flagship portable gaming device called the PSPGo that won’t use cartridges at all; rather it will deliver software directly to the device — just like an iPhone.

But even though the company is responding to trends that iPhone is driving, Mr. de Leon said the company is not worried that Apple’s device will take over their core audience. “At the end of the day, you buy the iPhone to make calls,” he said. “And you buy the PSP to play games.”

Cammie Dunaway, vice president for sales and marketing for Nintendo, echoed similar sentiments about the company’s lineup of portable hand-held gaming devices. “No one can match our years of experience in the hand-held market and the subscriber base we’ve built up over the last 20 years,” she said.

Michael Cai, vice president for video games at Interpret, a market research firm, said, “Dedicated portable devices have a certain appeal that the iPhone can’t quite match.” But that does not mean those companies are not paying attention, he added. “Sony and Nintendo definitely realize the threat of the iPhone and iPod Touch.”

IPhone shakes up the video game industry
Apple’s iPhone has already shaken up the mobile phone world. Next, it may shake up the video game industry.

In less than a year, the device has become a significant game platform. But its bigger impact could be to help change the way the game industry does business.

The iPhone is one of the first widely successful gaming platforms in which games are completely digitally distributed; the only way to get games on the device is to download them. That, along with some other important factors, has already created a new market.

On the iPhone, consumers can find more games updated more regularly and at a cheaper cost per game than what they’d find on a typical dedicated game console.

“It’s got everything you need to be a game changer,” said Neil Young, co-founder and CEO of ngmoco, which develops games solely for the iPhone.

Young is a gaming industry veteran, having worked in senior positions at Electronic Arts for 11 years. At a gathering in San Francisco tied to Apple’s developer conference last week, I spoke with him about how the iPhone is changing the industry.

When Young launched ngmoco last year, the premise for his new company seemed almost absurd. At the time, Apple hadn’t yet launched its applications store and no one knew how well it would work or how successful it would be. No one had downloaded any full-fledged programs for the device, much less games. And Apple had sold fewer than 6 million iPhones.

Young and his company now look prescient.

Global sales of the iPhone and its sister device, the iPod touch, have reached 40 million. In terms of sheer numbers of units, sales of iPhone platforms have already exceeded those of two of the major game consoles — Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 — and are within spitting distance of Nintendo’s Wii and Sony’s PlayStation Portable.

Not everyone with an iPhone is playing games, of course. But many are. Some 30 to 35 percent of the 1 billion applications downloaded from the app store so far have been games, according to Mobclix, a firm that keeps tabs on Apple’s iPhone marketplace.

Focusing on the iPhone has been a winning bet for Young and ngmoco. As a private entity, the company doesn’t release its financial information. But the first eight games the company released ranked among the top 50 most popular games in Apple’s application store and four made it into the top five. Before the launch of “Star Defense” last week boosted the totals, its games had been downloaded 7 million times.

That’s not bad, considering that ngmoco doesn’t have the brand recognition or marketing war chest of a publisher like Electronic Arts. And ngmoco’s games are all original titles. Unlike other developers, the company hasn’t been porting games developed for other platforms to the iPhone; nor has it been building games around popular movie franchises or characters.

Investors like what they see. The company was among the first to get funding from the iFund, the venture capital pool Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers put together to fund companies dedicated to developing applications for the iPhone. Ngmoco got a second round of funding earlier this year and has raised a total of $16 million.

Much of the traditional gaming business revolves around the expensive production of a physical product and getting it into retail stores. It also typically entails significant royalty costs to the game machine manufacturers. After costs are taken out, a developer may see just 50 percent of the retail price of the game.

With digital distribution, many of those traditional costs go away. Apple takes a 30 percent cut of the purchase price — and that’s it.

That has led to an explosion of applications on the platform. There are now 50,000 programs in Apple’s application store, of which nearly 12,000 are games, according to Mobclix.

With that many applications available, game developers have had a hard time charging the same prices they would for traditional games. The typical top-line game for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game, for example, sells for about $60; a comparable game for Nintendo’s Wii, for about $50, and one for Nintendo’s DS, at about $30.

In contrast, a top-of-the line iPhone game typically sells for no more than $10. And the average price for games sold on the site is less than $2, according to Mobclix.

But that doesn’t mean the iPhone can’t be a profitable platform, Young said. It just means developers need to think differently about how they produce and market games for the platform.

With traditional games, developers might wait a year or two between major releases. In contrast, ngmoco is planning on releasing new versions of its games every four to five months.

Similarly, developers of traditional games might rely on a television advertising campaign or major print advertising to promote their wares. In contrast, ngmoco is using more viral and digital marketing, posting videos on its Web site, encouraging users to post scores on Facebook and using one game to promote another.

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