Apple on iPhone App Store games: ‘The cream will rise’
And the competition will curdle
In an interview published in Edge, iPod and iPhone product marketing VP Greg Wosniak has dismissed concerns that the App Store is so overcrowded that it's difficult for consumers to find the good games.
"That's the beauty of the free market," he says. "The cream will rise. That's why we have a rating system that allows you to rate your experience with a game, and that becomes key to deciding what are the best games."
As our sister site PocketGamer.biz points out, this is only true up to a point. The cream would rise to the top a lot faster if you could sort games by rating on the App Store.
Wosniak also addresses complaints about the approval process, which has been criticised for its slow pace and general opacity. The approvals team, he says, "are doing the best they can and moving as fast as they can".
Inevitably Wosniak also takes a moment to snipe at the DS and the PSP, claiming that buying games for these consoles is too much like hard work. "You've got to be really motivated to buy a game for a DS," he says. "Not only is it £25, you've got to go out to the games store to find it.”
Unless you order it online, Greg. Unless you get it online.
He does concede that Apple unlikely to have the digital distribution market to itself indefinitely, although the picture he draws is one of a market struggling to deal with Apple’s blinding supremacy.
"Everything about the iPhone suggests where the future's headed, and I think a lot of the other guys are trying to scramble for what they do in response."
It’s an interesting read.
