ME associate editor Stuart O'Brien parties like it's 2001 all over again...
This week Sony confirmed it will soon begin offering bite-sized downloadable games for its PSPgo machine, under the 'Minis' moniker.
Not to be outdone, Nintendo is thought to be revising the royalty structure for its own DSiWare downloads service, presumably to encourage more content providers to its platform.
Both pieces of news confirm just how far iPhone's games/apps influence is being felt - Sony and Nintendo, two 'do as I say' platform holding giants trying their best to ape a new model thrown up by a company with little games pedigree.
To be fair to the Japanese pair, digital distribution will probably have been on their roadmaps since the PSP/DSi concepts were first conjured up. All Apple has done is force hands that had originally expected to do things in their own time and on their own terms.
But the arrival of Minis et al has also confirmed something else: the 'mobile' games industry is interesting once again. I use the inverted commas because clearly nowadays we're talking about devices that aren't necessarily cellular in nature (yet).
Article continues belowAdvertisement
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Well, no-one really knows, because no-one really knows what to charge for an 'app store' game. It's all part of the learning curve.
Certainly there are a few surprised/disappointed folk out there who thought the arrival of iPhone (and even N-Gage) was going to usher in a new era of £10-20 high-end mobile games. That doesn't look like it's going to happen, at least in the short-term.
The App Store, for example, is drowning in casual games, with companies such as Firemint, Ngmoco and others emerging from nowhere – and others like Fishlabs diverting their energies entirely – to exploit an easy-access publishing model and eager user base. According to a survey by PocketGamer, 52 of the top 100 best sellers in 2008 were original IP and 36 cost less than $1. How different from the Java/operator portal norm.
At least part of the reason for this is that technology has been taken out of the equation, with playability and accessibility now key elements of the magic formula.
One wonders if things like 3D (for 3Ds sake) should ever have been in there to begin with. There will definitely be a large number of industry sages out there aching to let out a bellowing "I told you so!"
So, once again we have a mobile games industry engaged in lively debate, standing in front of a wealth of opportunities, and countless more that haven't been thought up yet. It's just like 2001 all over again.
I guess we should be careful what we wish for though. How long will it be before we hear developers and publishers bemoaning 'app store fragmentation'?
What's that? You already are? Oh...
