A billion is a lot

The New York Times has an article by Seth Schiesel about Apple and the App store:

Apple announced recently that iPhone and iPod users had downloaded an impressive one billion programs from the company’s online App Store in a mere nine months. Meanwhile, 15 of the 20 most popular paid downloads since the service opened have been games. These two facts are not unrelated. Apple hasn’t been this relevant in video games— and video games have not been so relevant to Apple— since the early 1980s, when the Apple II was a major platform for computer games.
It is about time. Even as Apple has spent most of the last 25 years trying to cast itself as the creative, youthful alternative to dour, dowdy Microsoft, it is Microsoft that has become a dominant power in video games, through both the Xbox and Windows. By contrast, Apple has historically acted as if it were embarrassed to be associated with gamers.
I should know, because I was a Macintosh loyalist who tried to hold out as top game after top game went to PCs, only arriving on the Mac months or years later, if ever. I finally capitulated about 10 years ago and bought my first Windows computer.
So when I heard last summer that Apple was extolling the iPhone’s new ability to download games, I was skeptical, skittish and fearful of being burned by Apple again. Yet by this spring the buzz in the industry about the potential for iPhone games had become so strong— with some evangelists for Apple claiming that the iPhone is a better game machine than even Nintendo’s hugely popular DS line— that I submitted to the hype and got an iPhone.
After carrying it around for several weeks, a few things are clear. At its best, the iPhone delivers a casual, often delightful, frequently whimsical gaming experience. Most of the best iPhone games, like Flight Control from Firemint and Pocket God from Bolt Creative, use the device’s colorful touch-sensitive screen in the service of intuitive game play accessible to almost anyone. (In Flight Control that means using your finger to trace the flight path of planes and helicopters landing at an airport. In Pocket God that means using your fingers to “grasp” one of the inhabitants of the island kingdom you rule.)
Yet purely as a game machine, it would be ludicrous to compare the iPhone to the DS series or even to the Sony PlayStationPortable. Those searching for a deep, meaningful, narrative-driven experience will generally have to look elsewhere. And because of its design, control options and, perhaps most significant, its outrageously bad battery life, the iPhone cannot possibly replace a DS or PSP in the bag or pocket of anyone who actually plays games on the go more than a couple of days a week.
But perhaps it is not meant to. Perhaps it is sufficient for the iPhone to be the best phone for gaming rather than the best overall portable game console. What the iPhone offers that the DS and PSP lack is its huge library of downloadable games among the more than 35,000 total programs available on the App Store.
Most of the top games on the iPhone cost less than five bucks and can be downloaded in a matter of minutes. They are designed, like arcade games, to be consumable in bites of only a few minutes each. And, as in an arcade, if the iPhone user gets bored, it is easy and cheap to find another momentary diversion.
In that sense, the iPhone represents gaming as a notional activity rather than as a destination activity. Rather than playing games while sitting in a cafe, iPhone users could just as easily be checking Facebook or the latest sports scores. Browsing the App Store for a new 99-cent diversion, they could just as easily buy the Moron Test as a game like StickWars (two of the top paid downloads this week).
By contrast, DS or PSP users are usually going to a physical store, paying $20 or $30 and then spending dozens of hours over many months exploring their new game. For those players, extra features like being able to edit pictures and manipulate music on Nintendo’s DSi are secondary to actually playing games.
Not that the iPhone is capable of delivering sustained mobile game play anyway. Because it does so much, the iPhone 3G that I have been using cannot last even one full day of intensive use without being plugged in, which for me sort of defeats the purpose of a mobile device.
For example, I can sit down on a plane to California with my DSi with every confidence that I will be able to play Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars the entire time if I want to. Yet while downloading and playing games on the iPhone, I hardly made it in a car to Woodstock, N.Y., barely two hours and 100 miles from Times Square, before the battery conked out. That’s when I started noticing that iPhone devotees always carry chargers with them.
Yet the battery is typical of the iPhone’s few shortcomings: they only highlight how I want to use it more, not less. The real question is not whether the iPhone can replace a DS or PSP. The real question is whether the iPhone provides a unique, unparalleled gaming experience for a phone, which it surely does. After Apple’s many years in the gaming wilderness, it is a pleasure to say welcome back.