i read a bit here on the concerns of piracy of games. i think it has create a bit of stir and worries among the game developers / publishers. It is a truth that will always exist for portable gaming scene and will always be. The best way to minimize this piracy, is put it behind by reaching to the mass market for the casual and serious gamers. There are many psp piracy too and PSP is still selling well in the mainstream. Why is that so is because the mainstream gamers will still support it and their parents will still buy games for their kids and that's how they found out about games occasionally when they pick up a PSP magazines in a bookstore. At the same time, most people will not like to upgrade / hack their device every time for new iphone games that require newer firmware. And this i think Apple did very well to hinder this process. I believe 90% of iphone contract users will no go about hacking their phone just for some games. It is either they go for free games without wanting to pay at all or those willing to pay. Coming from remarks that there are more people whom did not paid for iphone games in the gaming network, i think this is due to gaming is not not picked up well enough by the mainstream people. So the first impression is the piracy is hitting bad on the iphone gaming industry. Coming back to reaching the mass market, i think the app store is doing its best in its own way. It is marketing very well to those who know the presence of app store or familiar with apple gaming for iphone or touch arcade website for the niche market But here comes the problem. There are too many games and no one reads about the deserved games unless they go to app store. A game in the app store with 5 screenshots and writeup about the game is also not enough. There are no reviews from the gaming experts and people who never bought an app in app store before are the most skeptical. So how to reach these people and the many more out there who do not browse in app store at all? Most people will read and move on as the first question in their mind is - Wait there are still some more games to look at! This behavior make them takes time until they made up their mind to purchase or even not purchase at all. Maybe until one day Apple decide to put video trailers, reviews from gaming websites or have a "add to favorites" feature to help people decide better what games they should buy! So the main point i am driving at is that we all should have an iphone gaming publication maybe by toucharcade some day since so many good games of various genres have created iphone as one of the leading gaming platform. With people can easily take an issue and browse to find out what are the games of the month, reading the reviews or previews and interview articles on game developers and publishers like EA , Gameloft and Ngmoco and many more..it will definitely bring iphone games to the next height. With this popularity, i am 500% sure more and more mainstream people will buy games and support the iphone game industry and developers and game publishers can make even more premium games and the piracy issues will not bother so much to us as it is doing today. Thanks for reading my personal thoughts in these.
The days of gaming magazines are over ever since you can get all your updates on gaming news for free on the internet.
how about a good forum which covers the issues and new releases of apps as well as gives place for users to review apps they've played and discuss them? all in favour of this idea, say i
yes and no. that depends how you look at it. Yes is for those following blogs like Toucharcade. No is for over 50% iphone users who are not into pure gaming and have no time to following all the time. Also the experience is not as good as reading on prints. Having a magazine is to create awareness and pay attention to it. With a magazine on iphone, will tell people iphone have its gaining popularity in games. I am sure people who read about it will say "wow i never know iphone games are that good. Let me pick this game up in app store!" Nowadays people browse a lot of magazines during free time at bookstores. More and more people will get into the gaming on iphone.
Yes, it's all very good for everyone else, but the mag publishers don't earn enough to survive if everyone is just going rip open mags at the bookstore and browse them for free. Print magazines often contain out-of-date info, and they just can't keep up. The trouble with print media is that they are take time to get out of the printing house. Appstore game prices fluctuate, they get updated, they get new content suddenly etc. How is a mag going to be able to retract a bad review/ rating fast enough to reduce damage to the dev when a game is suddenly improved after some feedback? So, yes, I'm still skeptical overall. And I think people who aren't interested in games are not going to suddenly be interested just because there is a magazine on it.
Did you mean something like this? http://www.iphonelife.com/ It's in print and distributed internationally, although I don't know what the circulation is.
The problem is, magazines, particularly gaming related magazines, are struggling to survive. One is going bankrupt every couple of months. There are certainly no publishers willing to start up new magazine concepts. The iPhone has another disadvantage in that it's solely an internet-enabled device. If you buy games for the iPhone, you are already going to have an internet connection. A few magazines for Xbox, PS3, Wii are managing to scrape by because there are buyers who don't have internet connections, but everyone with an iPhone must have an internet connection, so they are all using the internet to find out about games. However, I do agree that it would be nice to have some kind of nicely laid-out, monthly round-up of the best games on the App store. I'm hoping that when the iTablet comes out, it can be the saviour of the print industry, and allow people to buy magazines through the App store and read them on their iTablet. This would allow someone - maybe even TouchArcade - to digi-publish up an 'App store gaming monthly', with a nice layout, big featured reviews, and interesting editorial articles. It would even be able to have artistic full page ads like a print magazine, which I think readers would enjoy more than banner ads, but also advertisers would appreciate it more as they get a nice large ad and people won't be using ad-blockers. I'd certainly subscribe to such a magazine. Heck, I'd even advertise in it too. It's all dependent on what Apple does at this point.
That's a good magazine... plus the Fall 2009 edition has a writeup on Rogue Touch, so I bought two copies! Other magazines are doing iPhone game reviews too. I was also in Retro Gamer, a UK magazine, earlier this year. Print is definitely not dead yet, its just that people like us who browse the forums in places like TouchArcade are ahead of the curve. There's still far more people out there who read magazines and newspapers, and have never heard of TA, AppShopper, etc. And yes, a lot of them have iPhones.
If someone gave me all the information to go in it, I'd design it. If you guys are really interested in something like this PM me.
I'm not that into gaming. If I wanna know about a specific game, I come here to TA. Even for console gaming, all I do is search for the video and written reviews. I could see games as taking 4 pages out of an iPhone/Apple magazine , but not a full-fledged magazine just yet.
