iPhone Now Has Its Own Summit on Game Development

[johannes]

Looks like more and more people are recognizing the iPhone/iPod Touch (and in the future, the iPad) as a gaming platform.

Starting Tuesday, the Game Developers Conference (GDC) Mobile/Handheld summit will begin, offering 18 discussions on things like "bootstrapping games on Android;" "Creating augmented reality experiences on Nintendo DSi;" "Social networks: The new marketplace for mobile games?" and more. There's even one called "Get your iPhone game to 2,000 other devices."

But strikingly absent among those 18 panels are any that deal with game development specifically for the iPhone. And why? Because for the first time, the GDC advisory board decided that Apple's smartphone is an important enough platform to warrant its own summit.

As a result, on Tuesday and Wednesday, hundreds -- if not thousands -- of people will shuffle into the 16 panels and discussions that make up the iPhone Games summit, sessions like "How to keep your game on top of the charts;" "Fastest path from concept to Top Paid;" "A big dash of success: how to capture the female iPhone gamer" and more.

How about that, ey? Its OWN summit.

Asked why he thought the iPhone has reached that point in people's perceptions, Jeffrey said, "I think it's probably the fact that it's become such a ubiquitous device in the West so rapidly and has been adopted by an extremely wide demographic. [Yet it has] still retained its cool factor, despite numerous other handsets coming in and competing."

From a developer's perspective, Jeffrey explained that Apple offers a much easier roadmap to designing games than some of its competitors, including a $99 software development kit and the fact that anyone who wants to design games for the device can do so. By comparison, Jeffrey said, Nintendo and Microsoft--for mobile devices running its Windows Mobile 7 operating system--require developers to be approved.

For the complete CNN Tech article: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/09/c....html?hpt=Sbin

[enuhski]

Wow! This is great news!

As a reviewer of iPhone/iPod Touch games and apps, I'm glad that the GDC is focusing specifically on the iPhone for game development.

A lot of great developers are coming up with different ways to market their games, and landing on the App Store's featured picks is almost a fantasy.

This is a sign of great things to come.