A second post for you on this Sunday, as you are likely watching the championship games of the National Football League.
And that turns out to be the topic of this update: Games.
You will likely see a TV commercial or two for the game “Mass Effect 2″, a big new release coming out for the XBOX360. In fact, as the NFC championship game is underway, Bioware–the company behind “Mass Effect 2″–is hosting a live streaming TV show featuring a couple of their folks answering questions about the game while giving updates on the Vikings-Saints matchup.
And about five thousand people are watching the live stream as I type this. Now that’s not anything like the number of people who will be watching the NFL games on TV today, but its more than just a few hundred die hard gamers.
Jeff Scott of the great blog 148apps wrote a must-read guest item for the folks over at CrunchGear about what the importance of games could mean to this week’s expected announcement of an Apple tablet device.
I was reading that about five minutes after catching the news item from the widely read tech blog Engadget about how attendees of the Game Development Conference will find a little more than the usual sponsor swag in the bag they get when they check in for this year’s conference. This year’s GDC attendees will get their choice of a spanking new Droid or Nexus One smartphone.
So why is that a big deal? (Aside from being a cool phone to get for free?) Because it shows that Google, whose Android software powers both phones, wants the game developers who attend the GDC to think about writing games for their phones, as well as that very successful and popular phone with the first letter “i” from Apple.
Because when you get right down to it, that is the big difference between the iPhone and Blackberry–the big name in “smartphones.” You know, those cell phones that seem to do everything besides letting you make phone calls. Blackberry users typically don’t have a lot of games on their devices, in part because they aren’t that into games–and even if they were, they’re not a whole lot of games available.
Not ones that you’d want to play that much. Aside from the ubiquitous “brickbreaker” maybe.
Compare that to the iPhone (and it’s cousin iPod Touch) that has so many games, you can’t even keep track of them all. It may not be the aforementioned XBOX or a PS3, but neither of those will fit in your pocket. Closest comparison you would make would be to the pocketable Nintendo DS, but the DS is mostly in the pocket of kids.
The iPhone/iPod Touch seems to be in the pocket of every other person over the age of 16. And it’s a respectable platform with the ability to let you buy a game pretty much anytime, anywhere you want.
Now do you understand why Google would give away a $500 phone (if you bought either the Droid or Nexus One new) to as many game developers as they can? Did I mention that in 2009 the market for all video games was something like a 50 Billion dollars-PLUS one? And even though the recession may have slowed down the market on the consoles like XBOX, PS3 and even the Wii, the games market on mobile devices is going up, up, up?
Because these days…playing games is anything but kid stuff.