iPhone Games Bulletin

My iPhone games presentation from Mobile Games Forum 2010

Assuming the delayed-post thing works, this should be going live as I leap on-stage at the Mobile Games Forum in London, to ramble for half an hour about trends in iPhone gaming. The presentation is embedded below, and once I get offstage I'll make it properly downloadable.

10 Trends in iPhone Gaming

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$9.99 price point for iPhone Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

Rockstar Games launched Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on the App Store today, and mighty fine it looks too.

The game looks visually somewhere between the DS and PSP versions, and it requires the latest firmware to play (which could encourage the remaining iPod touch laggards to upgrade).

But most interesting is the price: $9.99 in the US and £5.99 in the UK. If any game was going to break the 10-dollar price ceiling on the App Store, it was this. However, Rockstar has elected to stick with its fellow console firms on $9.99.

iPhone Games Bulletin is back from Monday 23 November

I've had a week off to refresh my batteries, but the Bulletin will be back from Monday. As a quick note if you're reading this as a newcomer: the iPhone Games Bulletin is a daily email with industry news about iPhone gaming.

This blog is just a snapshot - to read recent Bulletins, check out the official Twitter feed.

My app stores presentation from Develop Liverpool

Earlier today, I gave a presentation at the Develop Liverpool conference comparing and contrasting iPhone's App Store, Android Market, BlackBerry App World, Nintendo's DSiWare and Sony's PSP Minis. The idea was to look at what opportunities and challenges there are for games developers and publishers across these digital platforms.

It seemed to go well, but there were a lot of bullet points and graphs. So here's the presentation in its entirety, so you can grab the bits that interest you.

5 app stores under the microscope

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The average iPhone user has spent $80 on apps (claims a survey)

Every week, someone else pops up with a survey trying to put numbers on the application usage of iPhone users. This week it's AppsFire, which has commissioned a survey of 1,200 iPhone owners, and finds that the average user has downloaded 65 apps for their device, spending around $80 in total.

65% of the apps installed by those users were free, so the average price paid for premium apps was $1.56. Those 1,200 users had installed 15,000 unique apps on their devices, meaning there's a long no-sale tail of 50,000 or so apps - at least according to this sample size.

Meanwhile, AppsFire estimates that the total paid iPhone market so far is around $3.3 billion - $2.3 billion for developers and a cool $1 billion for Apple.

This was originally published in the iPhone Games Bulletin, a daily news/analysis email for the iPhone games industry. For signup details, click here.

FCC’s App Store investigation has implications for iPhone games developers

The US Federal Communications Commission has launched an investigation into the App Store, following last week’s controversy about Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice app.

The FCC has requested information from Apple, Google and AT&T Wireless, and some of its questions to Apple will make games developers prick up their ears. They want to know what other apps have been rejected from the App Store and why, whether there’s a list of banned apps or categories of apps, and what the standards are for considering and approving apps for iPhone.

If the answers are made public, they’ll make interesting reading for games developers, who have been one of the most vocal groups about Apple's submissions and approvals policies.

This was originally published in the iPhone Games Bulletin, a daily news/analysis email for the iPhone games industry. For signup details, click here.

iPhone Game of the Day: Minigore

A confession: I haven’t played iDracula yet. So I was keen to jump on Minigore as soon as it came out, with similar buzz around Chillingo’s latest 99-cent game.

Instant reaction: it’s very fun, with a distinct visual style, and bags of ‘just-one-more-go’ appeal.

You wheel around the screen controlling your hero with one virtual analog stick, and firing in a 360-degree arc with another.

It feels like a 1.0 release, though – it will hopefully benefit from some different game modes and maps, and perhaps more sophisticated use of the OpenFeint social platform in future updates – for example, achievements.

App Store Link: Minigore

This was originally published in the iPhone Games Bulletin, a daily news/analysis email for the iPhone games industry. For signup details, click here.

iPhone games developer reports 96% piracy rate

Bram Stolk of Slant Six Games has written a blog post about the sales of his The Little Tank That Could iPhone game. In its first five days on the App Store, it sold 45 copies. However, 1,114 unique players accessed its leaderboards.

Eh? "The game got cracked, and distributed via torrents," writes Stolk. "Those crackers are a weird bunch, even taking pride in their work. Proudly tagging my game with 'cracked by Hexhammer'. Well screw you Hexhammer. If you had any talents yourself, you would make your own game. Cracking one is petty."

Too right. But it does shine a light on an issue - iPhone game piracy - that few larger developers and publishers are willing to talk about publicly.

This article is taken from the 28 July issue of the iPhone Games Bulletin. To sign up to receive the full thing every day for free, click here.

Introducing iPhone Games Bulletin

The switch has been flicked, iPhone Games Bulletin is live! But what is it? It's a daily email with news and information for the iPhone games industry.

Developers, publishers, advertising networks, technology firms, analysts... Anyone who's involved or interested in iPhone gaming, and wants to keep up to date with news about publishing, marketing, advertising and technology, while also being pointed to other stories that will provide food for thought. You can read a sample issue to get a better idea.

It's not designed to replace existing mobile games or mobile industry websites - they're always credited as the sources for stories, with links to read the original article. And it's not trying to compete with Twitter as your source for breaking news either.

Why Apple needs more iPod touch users to upgrade to 3.0

Apple proudly announced that six million people have upgraded to the new iPhone 3.0 software earlier this week, but new stats from mobile ad network AdMob indicate that the overwhelming majority of them are iPhone users.

In fact, requests from its advertising network indicate that just 1% of iPod touch owners have upgraded to the new software. Why? Well, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the $10 charge for the software upgrade might be the reason.

iPhone users don't have to pay, and according to AdMob 44% of them have upgraded.