Dear Reader:
Does Apple see the iPhone as a competitor to the DS and PSP?
A portion of an EDGE interview with Greg Joswiak, Apple’s VP of iPod and iPhone product marketing…
E: Do you see iPhone as a direct competitor to DS and PSP?
GJ: It’s interesting. Let’s take it at multiple levels. At a customer level, you look at this product and you see it’s much more portable than those other products. It has a very large screen and multi-touch, which allows it to do things those other products can’t do; it has an accelerometer that allows you to manipulate games in a way the others don’t allow you to.
So from a hardware experience it’s significantly different. But, again, the App Store becomes a key part for both developers and customers. For customers, it means they have access to all the apps, and for developers, they have access to all the customers, because the App Store’s on every device. Contrast that to the physical goods – you’ve got to be really motivated to buy a game for a DS. Not only is it £25, you’ve got to go out to the games store to find it.
That limits how many titles they can have on the shelf, and then there’s the cost of moving physical goods. You’ve got to forecast it, and if you forecast it wrong it’s going to cost you money. There are all these issues with moving physical goods, which you don’t have to deal with in the electronic world. This also means our games are much more affordable. Rather than being £25, most of our games are £6 or less – a fraction of the cost. From a customer standpoint, I can experiment with more titles. It’s not such a big investment if I’m going to spend £3 on something, whereas if I have to spend £25, it’s a much bigger decision. And customers are buying more games.