According to this link

http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/biztech/iphone-games-put-the-heat-on-sony-nintendo/2008/11/24/1227491432729.html

According to the article, there have been 50 million game purchases through the App store.

There are 13 million Iphones sold, giving an attach rate of 3 if we assume that 0 Ipod touches have been sold. Obviously, this isn't true, but my guess is that the Iphone is more popular than the touch, assume 7 million touch sales then the attach rate is 2.5

50 million games in 17 months

= 2.9 million games/month

By comparison the PSP shipped

101.7 million games by the 27th month of its life

= 3.8 million games per month

I couldn't find PSP hardware sales for 27th month, but the attach rate would be approximately 3

And that's being generous to the PSP, because that's shipped numbers of games, not sold, and because attach rates and game sales are lower in the early years

Anyway, the Iphone is not really a threat to either Ninty or Sony, as Apple is going for market expansion, but my point is that the Iphone is very much a viable gaming platform, and should become more so in the next year or two

My data comes from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games

It says 50 million games have been downloaded, not purchased.

Yea that includes a whole lot of free crap.

Yep and also you're comparing to PSP's shipped numbers and not including the downloaded SW as well that's been available for awhile on certain titles, might not be a lot but if you're including free downloads for the Iphone/Itouch, you might as well include those, and include downloaded PSP game demos off the PS Store too.

i'd like to see that in the form of a price breakdown.. because that could very well be less than $50mil (or even $25mil if free games were counted), so 50mil games downloaded doesn't really say much

Then in comparison to the single highest selling ds game, which has sold 20million copies at i don't know what price (lets say $10 average, which is quite conservative i would think) - that is $200mil in sales (ie. that people have spent), and by itself trumps the iphone game sale quantities.. So my feeling is that nintendo and sony have absolutely nothing to be worried about

Apple will never be a threat to Sony or Ninty, Both the DS and PSP have Exclusives that put apples gear to shame.

Then in comparison to the single highest selling ds game, which has sold 20million copies at i don't know what price (lets say $10 average

10 dollar average? Nintendogs cost 20 pounds on Amazon UK (which tends to be far cheaper than the average in Europe).

That's a 30 dollar average in Europe. Amazon in US has it at 30 dollars, but I guess 25 would be on the safe side.

So a 25 dollar average is pretty much the minimum (it is being pretty pessimistic, I would guess it is ala 30-35 dollars)

Other than that, I agree with you, and this only makes your point even stronger.

Wow, seraphic and tabsina. Did you even read my post?

@ everybody who actually read my post and responded in a constructive manner, I kinda assumed when I first read it that they would not count demos as games, but you're probably right really.

@ Tabsina (ps, I will bold words that you must read. Why would you look at revenue?

If you're looking at it from a VGChartz perspective, you count sales

if you're looking at it from a perspective of a game company considering which to develop for, you count profit/manhours the game took to make. If for example you could make 10 Iphone games that each make $100k profit, surely that's better than making a single PSP game that will end up making anywhere between -500k and 1000k

 Because we can see revenue exact.

Take Nintendogs, a game that would have gone even with 500K sales (including the late ads). We know pretty much the revenue, but we don't know the profit.

I don't get why you are upset with Tabsina really.

You make a flawed point in the OP. You take that the Iphone has sold equally much software to the PsP, but you do not. 1) Include PsP software/free downloads. 2) You include Iphone free downloads, which should pretty much be at least 2/3 of the total. 3) You compare the number of full, 30 dollar PsP games to 5 dollar 1 hour Iphone mini games. 4) You say that it should be a viable platform, solely by looking at sales numbers, ignoring profit/revenue. How many Iphone games are there? What is the best selling one, and what price was it sold at? Could these games have done just as well on DS, if not better?

The way I see it, it looks like the Iphone has ~ 15M solid game sales (excluding demos and free games), and that is being generous. That's pretty comparable to Virtual Console/Wiiware for Wii.

DS is getting VC (and WW?), so I think that is the only thing on DS that the Iphone could really be compared to as a viable option.

I'm not saying the Iphone isn't a viable option (it is as viable, if not more, than WiiWare), but your info didn't really say that.

The app store is from june.. so it's 6 months old..
From the article:

"500.000 copies of Super Monkey ball" at 10 dollars = 5.000.000 dollars in revenue.. surely they made back the costs

"Steve Demeter, creator of Trism, a $5 puzzle game similar to Bejeweled, earned $US250,000 in profit in just two months."

that's profit...

"New Zealand artist David Frampton's $7.99 helicopter game, Chopper, launched in July, was earning Frampton $4000 a day, The Australian Financial Review reported."

So it is a viable platform... anyone else thinking differently is just not thinking right...

and look at need for speed:

who doesn't want to play that..