Head of iPhone marketing sees competitors ‘scrambling’
Speaking to Develop, Greg Josiwak, Apple’s head of iPhone and iPod marketing, has revealed that he sees the company’s popular new mobile devices as the future of gaming, pointing to the DS as something of the past.
Speaking about Apple’s two new platforms Josiwak said: “It’s not just the screen quality – it’s the graphics capability, the compute power, the App distribution model. I had an analyst tell me in September – and he was so right – that the DS is the past of gaming devices, and that the iPod Touch is the future of gaming devices.
“It certainly has our competitors scrambling in what they’re going to do in reaction to this. I think it’s a tremendous start that we’re having at entering this gaming market, and there’s no doubt that that’s happening – it just is.”
Elsewhere in the feature the marketing boss discusses the opportunities the iPhone and iPod Touch afford smaller developers, and the implications of the distribution model and self-publishing.
To read the full interview with Josiwak, click here.
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Yeah I can really see Nintendo panicking, I mean the new DSi is hardly selling at all in Japan is it... Oh, wait... Still at least the NDS isn't selling well over here, oh hang on...
Seriously. I still play my DS constantly, and my husband just sold his PSP to pick one up.
With the amount of low quality rubbish on iphone dragging down the expectations of the punters it's becoming too risky for developers to invest too heavily into iphone products. if the systems doesn't change the iphone is going nowhere particularly interesting and the DS will remain the platform of choice for people who appreciate quality.
The problem with the iPhone as a gaming device is the lack of feedback from buttons... i.e. there aren't any.
If anyone has tried to play anything other than tilt, shake or poke-a-finger type games, they will notice how you have no sensation of control. You spend that long looking to see if your finger is over the touch-zone, that you can't watch the game. Until they bring out some kind of add on controller, the device has an extremely limited gaming potential.
Then there's the visibility issue. Unless your finger is like a matchstick, slapping your finger in the middle of a screen is going to obscure a good portion of the the play area. They added the sensible magnify feature for editing text, but this feature isn't there in the games. Anyone who has played Bejewelled will know the problems this causes.
There is no doubt that the hardware of the iPhone/iPod is a capable piece of gaming kit, and the screen is gorgeous, but until they fix the user interface on a gaming level, it is only going to attract novelty games, which isn't going to threaten the DS in the slightest.
the ds grafics quality is very poor and most of the games are absoloutly crap
ipod is the way forword and so is the mac
@5: Ah yes, because "grafics" are so much more important than gameplay and the user interface... or was that "graphics"? I guess that's why the PSP has outsold the DS by millions... or maybe it isn't. I can probably think of 20 quality titles on the DS, just off the top of my head, can you do the same for the iPod... without having to browse the App store to find them?
I can only assume you don't have a DS, or if you have, you haven't played many games. Like anything, the DS has good and bad games, but the simple fact is, the good games are way beyond anything the iPod currently has at this point in time, and even the bad games are better than the majority of iPod games.
I mean, you show me one game on the iPod/iPhone that is better in any way than Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass on the DS. There is a simple reason why games on the iPod cost around 59p most of the time, and that's because that's pretty much all they're worth.
It's always the same, open up the development to every man and his dog, and the majority of titles end up looking like the dog did all the work. It's about time people got over the "oooh, pretty pictures" effect and started to concentrate on the game instead, or are gamers simply turning into shallow graphics whores on EVERY platform now?
