Apple Positioning iPhone and iPod Touch as Mobile Gaming Devices

In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Steve Jobs acknowledged that the iPhone and iPod touch "may emerge as really viable devices in the mobile games market this holiday season."

The sentiment also echoes comments made by Apple's Greg Joswiak, the vice president of worldwide iPod marketing, when asked about the state of iPhone and iPod touch gaming.

I think you're going to see a wide variety (of games on the App Store). And they range all the way from casual to big time action games. This is where we are, less than four months into it. Squint your eyes and imagine where we will be in six months time, or a year. The graphics capablity is greater than the DS, we have multitouch, the screen is larger and there's an accelerometer. And we have the App Store. I think it's the future of gaming.

The Wall Street Journal notes that Sega has sold over 500,000 copies of Super Monkey Ball and that about 25% of the more than 200 million applications distributed by the App Store have been games.

These success stories have started to attract big name developers, including id Software who is said to be working on two iPhone games at this time.

TouchArcade.com covers the emerging iPhone gaming market which has recently seen the release of a wide variety of genres, including shooters (Defend!), 3D platformers (Armado) and retro remakes (Crystal Quest).