Steve Jobs is going after the game market
In an interview with the New York Times columnist David Pogue, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs emphasized that Apple was going after the video game market, particularly with its iPod Touch gadget.
That explains why there is no camera in the iPod Touch — a topic of much debate today, as Apple introduced a video camera in the iPod Nano but not the iPod Touch. Our own Paul Boutin wondered about this.
Jobs said in the New York Times interview, “Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine,” he said. “We started to market it that way, and it just took off. And now what we really see is it’s the lowest-cost way to the App Store, and that’s the big draw. So what we were focused on is just reducing the price to $199. We don’t need to add new stuff. We need to get the price down where everyone can afford it.”
During Apple’s press conference in San Francisco today, Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller touted the huge presence of games on the AppStore. There are 21,178 games on the iPhone and iPod Touch. By comparison, Sony has 607 PlayStation Portable games and Nintendo’s DS has 3,680.
There are more than 50 million iPhones and iPod Touches in the market. That is within spitting distance of the 51 million Sony PSPs sold, which explains why Sony is launching the PSP Go model — a new and improved handheld game system with flash memory instead of a proprietary drive. And though the Apple platform is only two years old, it is more than half way to Nintendo’s 100 million-plus installed base of DS handhelds, which have reached that number after almost six years on the market.
Users have downloaded more than 1.8 billion apps. If games have their fair share of those total downloads (and most believe they do), then more than 500 million games have been downloaded.
The cheapest iPod Touch is now sellng for $199. If Apple had put a camera in that device, it would have made it more expensive. The device already has a price disadvantage; the Sony PSP sells for $199 as well, while the Nintendo DSi sells for $169.
As you can tell from all of the numbers in this story, Sony and Nintendo have something to worry about. The newest iPhone 3G S is an extremely capable 3-D graphics handheld and it supports the OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics standard. The games that Apple showed off at the event today were gorgeous, but the real OpenGL ES 2.0-compliant games are coming later this year. Travis Boatman of Electronic Arts said that EA’s Need for Speed Shift game will be fully OpenGL ES 2.0-ready. And that means it’s going to look good.
Earlier this summer, I couldn’t find all that many iPhone games which I would consider to be next-generation iPhone titles. But after today, as you can see from our interviews with Tapulous and Ubisoft, those games are on the way.
