iGames Summit Tackles The Potential Of iPhone Gaming

While the iPhone created quite a bit of a buzz during its inception, few could have predicted the direction as a gaming platform it now seems inevitably headed in.  Gearing up for what's bound to come for the device, an iGames Summit was held last week at the University of California San Francisco.

Assembling a crowd of game industry people and journalists, the keynote panel consisted of developers big and small, all of whom have seen early success in the iPhone as an alternative upstart gaming .  Among the chief items discussed during the summit included:

Monetization. Pricing has, for the most part, been tricky for iPhone developers.  In fact, some folks at the summit believed that with so many apps now in the marketplace, it will only get harder to price your game higher than $1.  Apple's newest SDK, however, will allow apps to offer in-game transactions, which many developers agree will be the wave of the future.  Basically, you'll sell the basic game for a dollar but offer further levels, items and functionalities as additional purchases.

Marketing. It was pretty much agreed that the current App Store format didn't make for a very good promotion platform.  Various viewpoints and experiences were discussed, ranging from large PR campaigns to word-of-mouth promotion.  Everyone sees the future of game promotion on the iPhone to stay relatively the same.

Growth. Some members of the panel believed that it won't be long before traditional gaming companies (like EA) starts considering the iPhone platform as one that's hard to ignore.  With projected sales of Apple's flagship handset expected to reach 100 million units next year, that's a lot of potential consumers.

Photo Credit: Quickly Bored