EA Getting In The Game With iPhone
Gaming’s biggest annual conference E3 is currently going on in Las Vegas, and the amount of attention the large developers are paying to the hot new girl in class - the iPhone - shows that people are taking it very seriously as a gaming platform.
Electronic Arts is one of the largest publishers in the industry, and their E3 press conference yesterday confirmed their commitment to creating unique, high-quality content for the iPhone.
They are mentioning a number of the big franchises making the jump including Tiger Woods 09, Need for Speed and Monopoly. This adds to unique titles like Spore Origins, which impressed many upon the unveiling in tandem with the iPhone development kit.
Some titles have already seen simple Java-based spinoffs for mobile phones but given the power of the iPhone, robust titles on a par with PSP games can be expected. Wi-fi and 3G allowing multiplayer, over-the-air full game downloads, unique accelerometer and touch-based interfaces? The iPhone looks to be a powerhouse to revolutionise yet another industry.
However, a lot of the titles they were showing off, including Scrabble and Tetris updates, have yet to be seen on the UK iTunes Store whilst Americans have been enjoying them for quite a while. Many UK consumers are voicing the disdain at the Amero-centric list of apps on display, whilst others like the Google app are missing entirely. Most titles which use GPS simply do not operate properly anywhere outside of the US. The ‘Where’ app seems to be miles off in locating services convenient to users, whilst the ‘Movies’ app simply does not cover UK cinemas or listings at all.
Better than the luck of the Irish, who currently have no games to download from their App Store. None. It is understandable that legal wrangling means that certain items hopscotch over countries, but in the global village we live in today, it is so easy to find out about these discrepancies and get miffed.
Global movie and game releases, for example. Are these more frequent due to the studios recognising the value in other territories, or is it that pirates leak on the net hours after a premiere which means potential lost revenue? They realised they couldn’t release titles months apart, or folks will just download them. Hence, simultaneous global releases!
As good as the App Store is, denying some items always results in people finding creative solutions, including setting up US accounts in the case of the iTunes Store and XBox Live to garner access to region locked content. The better the games people are prevented access to, the more inventive they become. We just hope that the jailbreaking of the iPhone doesn’t result in a repeat of the shift of handheld and PC developers to more secure home platforms to recoup expensive production costs, if free copies of Monkey Ball start appearing on the net.
Source: Kotaku
