Why I'm not developing iPhone games

Jan-16-09, 3:22 pm by Hanford
File under: Video games, Apple, game design, fun

Why I'm not developing iPhone games:

4. The iPhone's controls are not suitable for the types of games i want to make. Tilt control simply doesn't cut it for me. point-and-click is good but not when using a finger instead of a mouse. And the games I've played that use multi-touch have really been sucky.

3. Apple has the right to refuse my game. This creeps me out. I don't want to do a lot of development work, just to find out Apple it's going to deny me. You can't run a business on a risk like that.

2. The iPhone store is currently being flooded. Both with quality stuff, but also a lot of crap stuff. Reminds me of the Atari 2600 debacle. I think this current flood is disproportionate to the iPhone's market, meaning it is probably harder to have a hit game on the iPhone than it is on a PC casual game portal. The reason for this is that it's being heralded as a developer's gold mine, so it's attracting a lot of get-rich-quick apps (remember how hot Facebook apps were for a while? What happened there?)

1. It is unclear how to market and promote iPhone apps. Anyone who has been in the indie game biz for a while knows that marketing a game is, in general, a lot harder for an indie developer to do than actually developing the game. While there's tons of info online about how to market PC and Mac games, there's very little about how to do it for the iPhone. The current strategy seems to be "somehow get it on the top games list!!!" which really isn't a strategy at all.

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Robin wrote: May-11-09, 6:20 am

I quite agree that iPhone games have their own specificity, after all they are primarily phone games, no matter how many i's are there up front :). They simply do not allow for the complexity which is easily extendable with PC and Mac games.

However, what you are implying here forms a somewhat mixed message: you say you do not like iPhone games at all, but go on to mention (a prioritized?) point that app promotion is a mess... Speaking of which, I believe the App Store is doing its job.

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