ngmoco's Neil Young says iPhone games need improvement

Neil Young left EA to found ngmoco - a game developer aimed directly at the iPhone platform. Young isn't impressed by the quality of much of the App Store's 10,000 strong products, however, and has said that the quality of premium titles must improve

"My read on the market is most of the games that are $9.99 don't really deserve to be there," Young told MTV Multiplayer.

"If that's the premium tier of pricing on the device, my expectation would be the premium tier of pricing would have premium games built for the platform that fully take advantage of that, versus a cross-port from a Symbian or a DS game."

What Young seems to be saying, a tad disjointedly, is that he believes full price iPhone games shouldn't be a casual port of a different system's titles - they should be unique and designed specifically to cater for the system's technical strengths. And that's a fair comment - the iPhone is a very different platform to most gaming devices, and is only just being recognised as a handheld console rather than a smartphone.

"The only mega hit that's existed today at a $9.99 price point is Super Monkey Ball," he continues. "We're excited to get to the place where you get the first thing that's been built for the device, so the gamer could go 'You know what, this is every bit as good as a DS or a PSP game and, not only that, it's actually built from the interface out'."

Despite the massive popularity of the iPhone, full price games haven't been performing particularly well, with many sellers slashing prices in an attempt to remain in the App Store's hot lists. While a 59p market isn't likely to sustain the iPhone games industry, Young isn't wrong when he says people are rightly going to expect a significant difference between a budget and a premium game –-something that's not particularly evident as the App Store currently stands.

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