July 15th, 2009 @ The Hilton Metropole, Brighton
The Develop Industry Excellence Awards is the only event which rewards the work done by Europe’s leading games development companies.
October 27th, 2009 @ BAFTA, London
The London Games Conference will take place during the increasingly popular London Games Festival.
Booming AppStore proves Apple handset is viable platform for games development, says Sega
Sega and Apple has squashed any doubts over the iPhone's viability as a platform to make games for - the two have revealed that over 300,000 people have bought the Monkey Ball game for the device in just 20 days.
At $9.99 a pop, that works out to $3m revenue in less than a month - figures which legitimise the iPhone as a development platform, Sega's US boss says.
"That's a substantial business," Simon Jeffery, president of Sega America, told the Wall Street Journal. "It gives iPhone a justifiable claim to being a viable gaming platform."
The details come as part of a larger report which shows the AppStore has generated a huge $30m in sales in its first month.
And if iTunes' non-music and video sales stay at their current pace, with $1m being spent on games and other applications each day, Apple will be seeing at least $360m pass through its online store each year.
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It could in fact go even higher, claimed Apple CEO Steve Jobs
"This thing's going to crest a half a billion, soon," he said.
"Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time. I've never seen anything like this in my career for software,"
But much of the money goes into the pocket of content creators, not Apple, thanks to the 70/30 revenue split which sees developers take home 70 per cent of the profits made from the sale of their iPhone/iPod Touch applications.
"But much of the money goes into the pocket of content creators, not Apple, thanks to the 70/30 split..."
This is not "much" of the money at all, 70%! Imagine if you were selling something on eBay, and eBay took 30% of your profit, that would be outrageous! People already stay away from selling because of the bite they take. What a waste, Apple is just manipulating all of these devs. and stealing their money.
Also, the iPhone could never be anything of a gaming platform. Everything has to be entirely ported, which takes a long time for sophisticated games. It'll be as much of a hit as the ngage, if that!
Finally, app sales will only go down in the future, as the Apple-fanboys who had the money to go get the iPhone are the only ones who have the dough to waste on stupid apps, so they're the only ones who will buy anything. Once their fun has run out, it's done.
Steve is just riding on a short wave of excitement, when sales dip below 100 mil in 6 months, we'll see who's optimistic.
Hmmm. 30% is not a big deal when you think about software development and publishing. Firts, Apple gives you free (yes free) access for the SDK. You only have to pay 100$/year to be able to publish your application on their portal. Second, it uses a risk-free model for almost everybody here. Minimum dev cost for the creator, and max profits for the two entities. Starting a one man project, you need a Mac, and a iPhone and that's about it (around 4,000$). You set your sale price and let's go. It's the plug-and-play of software publishing. Third, the user base. How many users right now and to come ? Fourth, server, bandwith, downloads, all of this is paid by Apple. You can also try to do the same software with Internet distribution. Try to sell your product yourself for 1.00$ or 2.00$. I wish you good luck if you plan to sell for 1000$ in 3 months. I won't talk about other publishing ways.
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30 per cent going to the format-holder in this instance is pretty generous when you take into account the falling XBLA revenue cut, for instance.
this is very very special case just be front of thousands of other app that do not be sold very well.
APP store is just apple's tool for push hardware selling. not big pie for most of software vendor.
Apple taking only 30% is completely acceptable as they are the ones who made the iPhone, marketed it and are now marketing the game as well. If you can produce a decent game for the iphone, there is a lot of money to be made. All you have to do is probably have a fun concept and a dev time of about 4-6 months and you can probably start making huge amounts if your game catches on.
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