i see another huge gaming marketing opportunity

I think I have pointed out as definitivly as is possible based on the data that Symbian (and WinMo) users really don't utilize their headsets to the fullest. The metric I used is web browsing, which is a good demonstration as to whether an owner is a "power user". If you consider that Andoroid has the same share as Symbian on 1 phone released 6 months ago I think the correlation is pretty clear. iPhone/Android users are mostly "power users", most other OS's have not figured out how to provide an experience to the user that compells them to take advantage of their hardware. That should be an embarassement to the players who have been in the market for more than a decade, and yet are getting objectively crushed when it comes to actual software ecosystems. If people don't use their (free) browser their are more than likely not going to shell out money for a game or app.

The Symbian Appstore is a great idea, but they are late to the game. Everybody has one or has announced it, and in so many markets the first mover is the one to benefit most. The unified architecture (CPU, GPU, resolution, ect) also makes Apple attractive because the code doesn't need any tweaking to be used on any of the headsets or iPods.  Having many of the same/similar API's a major desktop OS also means developers come in with more pre-existing knowledge, documentation and tools.

Regarding all the different App Stores that keep popping up, and considering the first mover advantage (though some claim such a thing does not exist), the real competition between the manufacturers is not so much on who has the most downloads, it is a competition to get the most developer support for your platform. In 8 months Apple has gotten more developers onboard than Windows Mobile or Symbian have in years. Currently, Apple has 50 000 paid developer members, and who knows how many more have downloaded the SDK. Nokia, MS, Palm and RIM have an uphill battle if they aim to garner more developer support than Apple.

As you point out, Apple has a lot of things going for it, and IMO it is very clear they have planned a long term strategy to leverage everything they have. Existing OS X developers have very little trouble developing for the iPhone OS, the development environment is polished and the documentation is quite probably the best I've come across. But the real beauty lies in what comes next: the iPhone developers learn objective-C and Cocoa frameworks, and a portion of them will start doing apps for the desktop as well. I'm pretty much dead certain that there is going to be an intermediary step along that migration path, and that's going to be some kind of multi-touch tablet using the iPhone OS. And it will use the App Store for application distribution.

At least that's how I would do it if I was running things :)

On the topic of SDK downloads:

There have been more than 800,000 downloads of the iPhone SDK since its release.

And you hit the nail on the head when it comes to Apple trying use the the iPhone to leverage devs into Mac support. This is very clear. Mobile OS X is so very similar that many of the first batch of quality games were Mac games (Bugdom, Cro-Mag Rally come to mind). Talking to the Pangea folks a few months back about a support issue I asked what they thought of developing on the iPhone- the implication from him was that it was only slightly harder than flagging ARM in the compiler. He didn't get specific but he said it was very simple to port. This works well for Apple both ways since iPhone apps should be similarly easy to move to the desktop with some UI tweaks. More than that even is just the general training that these devs are getting with the OS. That should make them much more keen and comfortable when the proposition of multi-platform software comes up.

I will be contributing to this 30 million next week when I purchase a iPod Touch!

Congrats to Apple for making a successful platform and I hope it makes itself in the handheld market. Because it's a worthy contender!

Wow, I wasn't aware of the 800k figure. That's just staggering!

Now, about porting, it's both fortunate and unfortunate that things are so easy to port to and from desktop OS X. Unfortunate because the touch-UI paradigm is so different from the desktop that those ported games often feel off. It's not unlike the Wii and games ported from, say, PS2 with just waggle added. Yeah, it works, but it's far from optimal. And even though iPhone apps in most cases would be easy to port to the desktop, it would seldom make much sense since the design philosophy is so different.

Not to beat a dead horse but:

"The iPod touch doesn’t have a cellular connection, but users can access the Internet via Wi-Fi. It generated 6.7 percent of mobile traffic for AdMob in February. That’s less than the 11.2 percent traffic generated from the iPhone, but more than any other mobile phone. Motorola’s Razr came in third place, with 2.9 percent of AdMob’s traffic."

-AdMob

You just can't argue that this is the mobile platform to design for- excluding the DS and PSP of course.

I wonder what the average price of a game sold on iPhone/iPod Touch is, though?

If it were around $2, and 550M of the 800M apps are games, then all games sold for the platform would compare to the revenue of a single game like Wii Fit or Guitar Hero III. Or maybe the top 3-5 games on DS.

That's not a problem for anyone involved. There's still the opportunity for a small dev to have a hugely profitable business (per employee) on iPhone. And from Apple's perspective, the platform, not the content, is the meat of their business.

In the same way that digital distribution and Flash gaming on PC has not harmed console gaming, I don't think iPhone is a threat to DS. However, PC:home console::iPhone:handheld console is not a perfect analogy by a long shot, which is why this is interesting to watch and discuss...

@Erik Aston

I think you're propably quite close to the actual figures there, or at the very least, your estimates are not too low. Hopefully the new revenue models introduced but the iPhone OS 3.0 will entice buyers to spend a bit more, and hopefully devs won't "misuse" the in-app purchases too much. One of the given examples, buying a rocket launcer in an FPS, sounds just horrible to me. IMO, a much better way would be to release a 0.99$ "demo" or the game with just the first level, and sell additional levels from inside the game. That would partly address one of the biggest complaints people have had, namely the lack of a real demo possibility.

Crazy stuff, if it was more games specific I might think of getting it, but since it's more of an overpriced piece of Apple tech, I'll pass unless they lower the price or upgrade some features...