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With the success of the iPhone (and the iPod Touch, which can also access the App Store), there has been a huge influx of games to the platform, which is currently the best-selling U.S. consumer mobile phone.
At a recent game-related briefing in San Francisco, Apple’s senior director of marketing for iPhone, Bob Borchers, showcased a range of upcoming iPhone game titles, and laid out his company’s vision of why the uptake has been so swift.
Though most people think of the iPhone as the single target platform, the iPod Touch also works with the vast majority of applications. Borcher noted: “If you’re a hardware developer you’ve got two great platforms to develop for.” On top of that, Apple has “worked very hard to develop [the SDK] in a very comprehensive way.”
While Sega’s Super Monkey Ball, one of the launch games for the App Store and a 500,000 unit seller, was an early indicator of what the platform is capable of — Borcher described it as “a posterchild of what’s possible” — he believes that “things have gone so much further than that.”
Of course, this is true in terms of choice as well, perhaps making it more difficult to sell that many in today’s iPhone game market. There are over 8,000 applications available on the store in 20 different categories; according to Borcher, over 200 million applications were downloaded in the first 100 days of availability, from July 10, 2008.
