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.
Well.. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Just get Apple to block the lower-quality games then. Don't they do that already with other apps in the store? [cnet.com]
( Link was first hit from an "apple blocks competitor" Google search ).
Wishful thinking, opportunists and game analysts (Score:3, Insightful)
These articles are typical examples of why analysts get it wrong most of the time, especially regarding gaming.
The articles on the iPhone try very hard and yet make no sense.
You can see the wishful thinking, when an article is getting back and forth talking about different things to mislead the reader into believing they have a point.
Thus, "40 million devices or more a year that are capable of playing games" is then mixed with iPhone.
None of the gaming demographics are even taken into account.
The sales curve is not taken into account, the kind of product isn't either.
Thus, these analysts expect children to carry away iPhones/iTouch for gaming like they would carry away a DS. Actually they don't talk about the DS much, as it would destroy their argument fast. That's why they mainly talk about PSP.
Also, features necessary for mobile gaming are quickly forgotten to talk about interface or number of games so that the reader is lured into believing nothing else is important.
They won't talk about battery life or instant sleep mode or things like that. No, they try to tell people that sensitive feedback is useless.
They talk about number of games like the games they're talking about are the same, citing a few that are equivalent to handheld consoles, to blur the line.
Wishful thinking, there is so much in those articles, my head spins.