MacRumors is reporting that Apple is giving the opportunity to developers to give out up to 50 promotional compies of their iPhone and iPod Touch apps. With these codes, recipients can download a full copy of the application for free. This feature is currently only available for the US iTunes Store. This will allow developers to distribute review copies of their new games to sites like iPwnGames more efficiently.
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A lot of developers were complaining about the review policy of the App Store, and today Apple has finally made a big improvement. Since today you can only review an App when you’ve actually purchased it. It’s no longer possible to go to an App and just review it even though you haven’t used it. Developers were seeing negative reviews of people who hadn’t even played an App. TUAW has more info on the new review policy:
The frequent result is as you might expect: 100 reviews kvetching about price by people who never even purchased the application. That isn’t fair to developers, and it isn’t fair to potential buyers.
iPwnGames is off course the number 1 place to find out what new games are available in the App Store, but now there’s also an App that lets you know what new games are available in the App Store. GotApps allows you to create email alerts for certain keywords and categories, so you can simply create an alert for the games category and get an alert whenever a new game is out.
The Wall Street Journal recently had an interview with Apple’s Steve Jobs. He told WSJ that users have downloaded more than 60 million applications from the App Store in the first month. Most of these apps were free, but the total of sales so far was $30 million in the first month, so that makes an average of $1 million a day. Games account for more than 25% of all sales with 300,000 sales of SEGA’s Super Monkey Ball in the first 20 days. 300,000 times Super Monkey Ball priced at $9.99 gives SEGA a nice $3 million in sales so far.
“That’s a substantial business,” says Simon Jeffery, president of Sega’s U.S. division. “It gives iPhone a justifiable claim to being a viable gaming platform.”
SEGA seems to be very happy with the sales of their popular Super Monkey Ball game for the iPhone so they will certainly develop more games for the iPhone in the future.
Xbox 360 online gamers should definitely pick up the iXboxLive iPhone application that lets you check all your Xbox Live friends while you’re not sitting behind your console. The app lets you see what your friends are playing, what their Reputation is, it shows their Gamer Score and what their location is. The problem is that you can’t send messages to your Xbox Live friends. iXboxLive costs only $0.99 and was developed by Nicholas Pike.
Source: Gamebabl
Yesterday we posted about GTS World Racing for the iPhone and said that the game would come out in a couple of days. Apparantely Pazzazz Games was in the mood to let Astraware release it just a couple of hours after we reported about the loads of content in the game. GTS World Racing is now available in the App Store for $7.99 and is about 9.6 MB big.
One of the few games available for the Apple Newton PDA was DeepSpaceNewt, a space-based strategy game that was also available for the Apple II computer. DejaVu is now giving us a DejaVu with DeepSpaceNewt for the iPhone. You play as either a Stigon bopper or an Amalgamation starship and your goal is to blast seven bells out of your enemy who’s using torpedoes and phasers. $7.99 sure is pricey for an iPhone game, but it’s pure nostalgia for all Mac fanboys. DeepSpaceNewt is retro gaming at its best, and it’s now available in the App Store.
Boulder Dash imitations enough, but there’s only a few good Boulder Dash wannabe’s out there. Digga is a game that tries to be a Boulder Dash game for the iPhone. You play as Joe the Digga who’s hunting for gold. With 80 levels, nice graphics, loads of boulders falling on your screen and ghosts trying to fool you this game is packed heavy enough for a long trip. Digg is now available in the App Store.
Blackjack 21 from mobileage brings the extremely popular blackjack cardgame to your iPhone and iPod with nice play gestures, high resolution graphics and natural animations. You simply tap the chips to place a bet, swipe up to split your hand and swipe down to hit. The gameplay in Blackjack 21 looks very fluid, perfect for some pick up and play action. Available now in the App Store for only $4.99.
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