Analyst: iPhone on track to measure up with DS sales
But Apple can still learn from the DS and PSP
Games market analyst Nicholas Lovell has been chatting with CasualGaming.biz about how the iPhone is quickly reshaping not only the mobile gaming industry, but the handheld market, too.
Lovell, of Games Brief, details how he believes the iPhone is taking up the slack from complacent systems like the DS and PSP – already boasting significantly more games than Nintendo’s and Sony’s systems combined.
Figures are drawn from a BusinessWeek report that show the iPhone is on track to shift a whopping 40 million units in its first year - a figure comparable to an 18 month DS sales period from 2007 to mid-2008. This was a period of significant popularity for the DS, which has trailed off since the iPhone’s launch.
The back seat both the DS and PSP have taken since Apple’s device established itself firmly as a complete games system, rather than a smartphone, isn’t entirely due to the dominance of the iPhone.
Lovell highlights how the iPhone has appealed not only to the modern mobile, multimedia player and portable games user, but to developers as well. Building games for the iPhone is cheap, easy and offers far greater returns on the software house’s investments. Gleaning a profit from a DS or PSP game is becoming immensely difficult.
He does warn that Apple mustn’t also fall into this habit of manufacturer complacency, however, stating that the App Store is becoming increasingly bloated and disorganised.
So there are lessons for both Nintendo and Sony to learn from the iPhone - assuming it’s not already too late for them, which it probably is (in this generation, at least) - but Apple has a brief window of opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the DS and PSP if it wants to continue revolutionising the handheld games industry.
