That is the question, that is. Everybody is humping on DS & 3DS now but the real full spectrum games are still missing. Are they afraid of the huge amount of competition and minigames?
Uh where you get "most" from? Konami, Capcom, Hudson, Activision, Electronic Arts, Sega I think covers over half of the BIG gaming company. And they make for iOS. The ones that dont, Nintendo, Sony of course dont... They dont want PSP and DS to die.
This: Plus, I'm not entirely sure it is true. You have several heavy companies involved: E.A., Capcom, Namco, Square Enix, LucasArt, TellTale, PopCap, and iD are some of the really big gaming companies that do support the iOS...
A better question is: Out of the big companies that do produce for the idevices, Why don't they make full use of the device's capabilities, to bring forth better a better quality finished product? This question is especially directed toward EA Sports. Another question is: Will we ever get more high quality sports titles such as NBA 2K and others?
That's easy. Time and money. Relax !!! It takes time to make games, and programmers and project leaders have to work within their budget. 1 year ago exactly, there really wasn't anything good on the app store, but behind the scenes, EA, ACTIVISION, KONAMI, CAPCOM, etc were quietly hacking away at developing iOS games. Now there is a lot to choose from with "big developers" leading the way. iOS4 and the iphone4 just came out. What!, you want a game right now? Especially one that fully utilizes a new device (iphone4) or 1 year old device (3GS). Give them time. It's a "250,000,000-device" multi-national market, and it's not going to be ignored anytime soon.
Well firstly, because the market price point has pretty much been established at around 1-10 bucks, they'll usually get less return than with other handhelds, so they make less production-related investments. That, and the market for DS and PSP is probably much greater in terms of gaming.
Actually, I am thankful, that the biggest companies don't consider the iDevices a serious gaming platform, as I think indie games wouldn't have this much chance to be successful.
I wouldn't put much thought towards the App Store either if I had a strong foothold in the console gaming market. I want to make money.
Asked around at E3, no one had an "official" response they were willing to go on record for but price points and visibility issues were some of the things mentioned keeping the "big guys" from investing time/money in to the platform... Which is somewhat understandable. Release a DS game and you can charge $30-40 and get prime shelf space at every retailer that sells video games or release an iPhone game and charge at absolute maximum $9.99 without App Store gamers forming an angry mob to come tar and feather you then pray Apple features your game. DS games can also continue to sell at their original price point without issue, versus the inevitable fall to 99¢ for anything on the App Store. The money just isn't there for the big players, the reason EA and Gameloft are doing so well on the App Store is because they have very lean mobile development teams and create games across a swath of mobile devices that they can share code and assets with. For other companies who are used to working with multi-million dollar budgets, 12 month development cycles, and huge teams, this isn't a simple change.
My guess is that these low price apps are heavily undervalued and some big publishers don't want to sell their franchise games to compete with the mostly 1-5 dollar app market.
I am kind of glad that the big name publishers and such don't have a total stronghold on the gaming in the app store - some of the indie efforts coming out now are completely reminiscent of the PC Gaming scene of the mid-to-late nineties, there is so much creativity happening it is insane. Good games do need a longer development cycle - which is why I am glad that the dev teams working on say Aralon are taking their time to put out the game that they want to put out. I am a big fan of the pricing system on the app store - the 5-10$ premium app range is completely justifiable to me. Because most of the premium apps I have bought have been worth the price or more based on content when compared to similar games on other platforms.
Everything works on a smaller scale due to the pricing. What a 3 man indie game will make on the top 10 for 5 weeks may very well be some major publisher's marketing budget.
