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Plaupius on 20 April 2009
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Shanobi said:

So right now we're looking at 100 million + DS units sold to gamers, versus a possible 43 million i-phone users by the end of this year, the percentage of gamers in that number being unknown.

Look, I love apple, but really this isn't even an argument. I have 4 friends with i-phones, none of whom have purchased a single game and I doubt they have any intention to anytime soon.

People buy the i-phone for phone and internet tech. I'm sure the allure of games is there for a small segment of gamers, but where are these people?

Here we are on a gaming sales website, and I have yet to ever read anything like "I love the games on my i-phone", or "you people have got to go out and trade your DS/PSP for an i-phone". Where are the threads about some killer game that is on the i-phone that we must have?

From what I can sense gaming on the i-phone is just something of an afterthought for most consumers who buy the thing.

Again, I haven't seen any evidence that it's cutting into the PSP/DS sales at all.

At first I was going to write something factual, but I don't have the sources at hand so I can't provide any hard numbers on how many games have been downloaded from the AppStore. You can take my word that the number is in the hundreds of millions, though.

The reason you haven't read praise for the iPhone games is that very few games are actually praise-worthy. I have mentioned a couple of solid games, and I just today completed Rasta Monkey, which I paid $.99 for. Not bad for a few hours of play, though the game is far from perfect. But the quality of games is clearly rising, the "gems" are starting to emerge, and by the end of this year there will be some titles that can be seriously called games there. Once again, remember that the SDK has been available for devs for about a year, and that bigger devs have only recently showed more interest on the platform. Under these circumstances, it is natural that the platform is dominated by games that have been very inexpensive to make.

However, I don't disagree with your notion that gaming is more of an afterthought for the iPhone owners. If there are enough good games available, that might change: it is clear that the AppStore is a huge factor to the success of the platform and a solid game library can attract more gamers to switch phones or MP3 players.