Apple Dominance Continues In Smartphone Gaming

The huge lead that Apple enjoys in the smartphone gaming category includes a large device installed-base lead and an enormous advantage in the number of games available, but Palm, Research In Motion and Google each provided evidence at the recent Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco that they had no intention of giving up on the category.

It was the first time that RIM, Google and Palm took part in the annual conference, GDC Director Meggan Scavio said (CED March 11 p3). Palm was particularly aggressive at the conference, saying a public beta version of its webOS Plug-in Development Kit (PDK) became available at the Palm Developer Center online, and it demonstrated new games from early PDK developers in its booth at GDC (CED March 10 p4). But it was also the first time that a summit devoted entirely to the iPhone was held at GDC.

The Apple platform is a “big business” for Gameloft, said Baudouin Corman, Gameloft vice president of publishing, America. The company now has more than 60 games available for the iPhone and iPod Touch, he said. But Corman called Palm’s platform a good one for gaming, and said his company will aggressively support it. Gameloft was one of the first game makers to develop titles using Palm’s PDK and had 13 games for the platform at GDC, with “more games to come,” he said. Early signs were promising, he said. Other publishers backing Palm with games now are Electronic Arts (EA), Glu Mobile and Laminar Research.

Corman also called RIM’s BlackBerry an “important platform” for Gameloft, especially in the U.S. where all its mobile titles are available on that platform. The iPhone is “more fragmented” due to the huge number of applications available for it, he said.

The iPhone and Palm Pre, launched in June, are the only two smartphones on the market now that are capable of running the highest-performance mobile games available, said Joe Hayashi, Palm vice president of product management, platform and tools. He expressed confidence that more game makers will start backing the Palm platform, in part because the company’s new PDK “makes it easy to port” titles over to it, he said. There has been “a ton” of interest from game makers, Hayashi said. There are about 2,000 apps on the Palm platform now -- a far cry from the 150,000 apps that Apple now offers. “We know we're not the biggest” player, but Palm’s platform allows developers to be the most profitable, Hayashi claimed.

The most recent Gameloft releases for the Apple platform were GT Racing: Motor Academy and Rayman 2: The Great Escape. Initial sales of both were strong, Corman said. Gameloft said in January it reached 10 million paid downloads on the Apple App Store. Rival EA continues to be aggressive on the iPhone, focusing much of its mobile efforts on Apple’s device now. EA even said at GDC that it will bring its hit EA Sports Active franchise to the iPhone this year, passing over the Xbox 360 in the process (CED March 11 p4). Also on the iPhone platform is EA’s Tiger Woods PGA Tour golf series.

It’s hard to gauge how many of Gameloft’s mobile games on Apple’s platform are being played on the iPhone versus the iPod Touch, Corman said. But Simon Jeffery, chief publishing officer of ngmoco, said, whether a game is being played on the iPhone or iPod Touch “varies enormously from game type to game type.” “Core” games tend to be played more on the iPhone, while games targeted at younger players tend to fare better on the Touch because more kids have an iPod than an iPhone, he said.

Ngmoco has no plans for other mobile platforms, but will have “several games available” for Apple’s April 3 launch of the iPad, Jeffery said. They might not all be available on Day One, but rather “around the launch window,” he said. Developing games for the iPad is “not hugely different” from making titles for the iPhone and iPod Touch because “it’s the same operating system,” he said. But he said “some games will work better on bigger screens.” Ngmoco, unlike Gameloft and EA, only makes games for Apple’s mobile devices.

Ngmoco has migrated to a “free-to-play” business model, believing that’s the best way to build a large community of players and there are ways for developers to “monetize” the user base down the road, Jeffery said. The company initially introduced pay apps that found success, including Rolando, he said. But the company changed to the free model after seeing pricing pressure on downloads throughout the App Store, he said.

While some app developers have complained in published reports about sometimes long periods between when titles are submitted to Apple and their approval, Corman and Jeffery said they had no such problems. “Apple did a great job of communicating” to developers ahead of the holiday season that it could take longer than usual for apps to be approved due to the expected logjam of titles being submitted, Jeffery said. “We were prepared for it, so we didn’t put anything” up for approval in that period, he said. It’s “very typical” in the mobile game business for a glut of titles to be released then because companies want to take advantage of the many new devices that consumers receive for Christmas, he said.

Independent developer Dwayne Ratleff, creator of the recently released Don’t Eat That app, told us it took under a month for that title to be approved by Apple. The $1.99 app features information about food ingredients based on data from the Food and Drug Administration and similar agencies in other countries. It took only about nine months to create the app, which attracted about 7,000 downloads in about one month with little promotional fanfare, he told us. He was mulling whether to introduce versions of the app for other platforms, including Android and BlackBerry.