Adage reports that Apple is currently running a huge ad campagin for iPod Touch gaming on Yahoo! Games. Similar to a Nintendo Wii campaign from a while ago, Apple is ‘breaking’ the site’s page. TBWA/Media Arts Lab created this unique ad campaign for Apple. The iPod Touch gaming action shown in the ad makes the whole site move along. Apple is doing more and more efforts to reach more iPod Touch gamers.
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.
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.
During its “Let’s Rock” event earlier this week, Apple showed off a TV commercial for the new iPod Touch. The advertisement shows a number of games on “The funnest iPod ever” including Super Monkey Ball, Labyrinth, GTS World Racing, Cro-Mag Rally and many other cool titles.
At Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event Steve Jobs has announced a new iPod Nano and a redesign of the iPod Touch along with some other exciting new stuff. The second generation of the iPod Touch is thinner with a more slicker and curved design, a stainless steel back, a built-in speaker, an improved battery (36 hours for music, 6 hours for video), Genius playlist and integrated Nike+iPod support. For the 8GB version you pay $299, the 16GB costs $299 and the 32GB version costs $399.
And then there’s the new iPod Nano as well. It has a less grippy click-wheel, it’s faster and more responsive, it has an accelerometer, it looks nicer and it comes in a lot of different colors.
This friday we’ll be getting iPhone 2.1 firmware that has a few interesting new features. The battery life will be significantly better, you’ll experience less call drops, there’s a few bug fixes, Apps will crash less and you’ll be able to get backups faster to iTunes. There’s also iTunes 8 which features Genius playlists.
Steve Jobs announced that people have downloaded over 100 million applications from the App Store in just 60 days, and there are already 700 games available today. Phil Schiller, senior vice president of marketing, showed Real Soccer 2009, Need for Speed: Undercover and Spore Origins.
FingerGaming reports that EA’s Scrabble, which they showed off last week during a press demonstration, will only have a local Wi-Fi mode. When Electronic Arts announced the game for Apple’s iPhone many gamers hoped that this addictive board game would have an online multiplayer mode. According to EA it’s Apple’s fault that they can’t put an online mode in Scrabble because they haven’t made this ability yet. Because Apple doesn’t have the ability for online gaming yet developers are using other tools such as Neutron from Exit Games.
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.
A few days ago John Carmack said that Apple’s iPhone is “a graphical tour de force” and that it’s far better than the Nintendo DS and PSP combined. Tood Hollenshead, CEO of id Software, released some more information about their future plans for the iPhone. He says they certainly don’t want to be carried away and that John Carmack was very disappointed they didn’t have an iPhone game ready when the App Store launched:
“John is pretty disappointed we didn’t have the manpower and resources to have a game for the launch of the” app store, id CEO Todd Hollenshead said.
The in-house developers team for mobile games is just too small and had not enough time to get a game ready for the launch of the App Store. At this moment they can only develop one game at a time and they will probably have to gather up with a publisher:
“It appears that at this point that given the size of our team, we can only work on one mobile game at a time. We are probably partner up and the first (iPhone game) will be one where we work with a publishing partner.”
They would like to see both Wolfenstein RPG and and Doom 2 RPG on the iPhone, but they don’t know when those games could be heading to the iPhone. To finish up Hollenshead compared the Nokia N-Gage with the iPhone:
“The iPhone is cool, and the n-Gage was a nerd device,” Hollenshead said. “The iphone is a pretty damn awesome phone, it’s a great business device, it’s one of the best portable mp3 player you can buy, it can play videos. There’s a lot of reasons to have that device and it has the power to play games as well. It’s a cool device that you can play games on and they can be awesome games.”
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
