Mobile Gaming Market Heats Up 18
A few days ago, we discussed Sony's announcement of a slew of new titles for the PSP, part of their plan to reinvigorate the platform. Unfortunately, according to analyst Nicholas Lovell, it may be too late for the PSP to achieve what Sony had hoped. He says gaming on the iPhone and iPod Touch are rapidly expanding to fill that section of the market. Despite this, rumors have been swirling once more that the PSP2 is under development, and while Sony wouldn't confirm or deny, they were at least willing to talk about the rumors. Meanwhile, the App Store is dealing with a flood of titles that shows no sign of slowing, making it somewhat difficult to keep tabs on the higher-quality games. An Apple spokesperson discussed this in an interview with Pocket Gamer, and also mentioned that they'd be OK with a community gaming service similar to Xbox Live, should somebody decide to make one. It's likely that Apple will soon see more serious competition from Android Market; now that a pricing system is going online, the major publishers have more of an incentive to bring games to the platform. The Guardian's games blog recently went over some of the top games available on Android.
Re:PSP2 (Score:3, Informative)
I seriously doubt that the iPhone will be able to keep up with the PSP2, a dedicated mobile gaming platform, once its released.
If that's the case, there will likely be a divide between major label games and indie games. Apple copied Microsoft's semi-open XNA Creators Club model, allowing any developer to buy an iPhone devkit for $1,200 (Mac mini + KVM + iPod Touch + developer certificate). With Sony and Nintendo, on the other hand, a developer apparently has to be an established company with a separate office and a prior PC title, if warioworld.com is to be believed.
Re:PSP2 (Score:2, Informative)
An iPhone dev kit is actually $929 (Mac mini $600, iPod touch 8GB $229, $100 for one-year dev license).
Forget the KVM as you'll be switching to Mac OS X in a few weeks, believe it or not.