Given the law focus of this website, it is pretty rare for me to discuss games, let alone link to sites like Joystiq (a leading videogame website). But something interesting caught my eye there last night regarding the popularity of the iPhone.
The growth in iPhone sales has, of course, been pretty astonishing. When Greg Joswiak of Apple discussed iPhone Software 3.0 last week, he noted that the iPhone is now in 80 countries and has sold 17 million units, using graphs like this one to show the increase in sales. (Note the huge increase in June of 2008 when the iPhone 3G was introduced.)
The success of the iPhone is often compared to other smartphones. For example, RIM currently sells more Blackberry smartphones (combining all the various models) than Apple sells iPhones, although of course RIM has been making Blackberries for a long time whereas Apple's share of the smartphone market has already gone from zero to around 25% in a very short period of time.
Yesterday, however, the growth of the iPhone was put in a different context -- gaming devices. This week is the 2009 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, and the keynote address on Monday was given by Neil Young. No, not that one, but the one who used to work at gaming behemoth Electronic Arts and then left to start iPhone game developer ngmoco. That company has released numerous popular iPhone games including Topple, Rolando and Word Fu, and Neil Young was one of the developers showcased by Apple last week at the iPhone Software 3.0 announcement. Wired reports that in his keynote address, titled "Why iPhone Just Changed Everything," Young said that the iPhone is "the beginning of something very special" and that the introduction of the iPhone was as "important a moment in the game industry as the introduction of the
(Atari) VCS, or the NES, or the Game Boy, or Xbox Live, or massively
multiplayer games" in part because "Apple has trained 30 million people to download and install
applications on their phone, wherever they are." A Joystiq article about the presentation includes a slide that Young displayed containing data from Morgan Stanley
showing how the growth curve of the iPhone is more impressive than the
growth curves of the popular Nintendo DS and Sony Play Station Portable:
(Image from Joystiq)
I know that a lot of people love the iPhone for the games, and Young noted that 60% of the top 100 apps on the iTunes app store are games. Even so, it is not often that I think of the iPhone's success juxtaposed with the success of popular game systems, so I find this slide and Young's remarks interesting. Check out the Wired and Joystiq articles for more details.
