News

iPhone - may kill other phone game businesses?

by Guy J Kewney | posted on 09 June 2008

The new development platform for the iPhone - not just the 3G one! - "might finally put the lackluster java-based cell phone gaming market to death," thinks a games pundit.

Chris Tompkins commented that "While cell phones benefit from mobile stores for games and ubiquity, they suffer because they lack the graphical ability to run truly engaging games. Often they are designed poorly and only provide a minimal distraction at best." The question, thinks Tomkins, is whether games developers can overcome the "one sore spot: the lack of physical controls,

which will necessitate developers work creatively to build games around multi-touch and the accelerometer. Typical button mashing games (favourites of portable gaming) will never work without physical controls, and neither will most any other ports from other gaming systems.

He continues to suggest that there are some genres that lend themselves to multi-touch - examples would be real-time strategy games like StarCraft, [which] could work perfectly with your fingers.