Yesterdays F1 post reminded me of a post that I’ve been meaning to write for a long time (although now it’s a little out of date).
A while back, Brawn GP, F1’s fledgling, and championship leading, team have released a game for the iPhone, which, as expected. is a neat little F1 simulation. When it was initially released, there was only one track available, the home “London” track, but now there’s three more with more on the way.
What’s more interesting about this isn’t the F1 aspect so much, nor the game, but how the iPhone/iPod Touch platform enables companies like this to crack out small games and push them out to a wide audience relatively quickly. When you consider that the team has only really existed since March of this year, and that they are releasing a 3D racing sim three months later, it’s a pretty impressive feat.
What the means for the future is very interesting. Assuming that the console manufacturers recognise that there is a large amount of money to make from thr App Store model, as Apple are currently demonstrating, this might lead to a massive movement towards small time development shops/individuals developing lots and lots of small, very inexpensive games. It’s almost back to the old days where you could go out and buy a game for your C64 for 99p on a cassette tape.
This will hopefully remove us from the current games publishers vice like grip of charging us £50 for a single game, which can only be a good thing. Admittedly we don’t want to stop getting the mega-budget hollywood-esque games, but we do want more choice for less money.
So, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo – take note of the iPhone and pull your f’in finger out.
