UK developer FinBlade has done pretty well out of the App Store so far, with five games available so far, and strong sales for its WordSearch game.

However, MD John Chasey isn't getting carried away, and warns that developers who see iPhone as an unlimited pot of gold may be disappointed.

"Because of the success of some of the early iPhone games, a lot of people are now trying to get in there, and it's becoming very crowded," he says.

"Making your game or application stand out is incredibly hard. It's still open and anyone can do it, but there's definitely not the money being made by individual developers that there was in the first month after the App Store launched."

One catalyst for the goldrush was Sega's announcement early in the App Store's life that it had sold 400,000 copies of Super Monkey Ball - news that immediately sparked the greenlighting of some big-budget iPhone titles at other console firms.

"It's easy to assume that you're guaranteed to make money, but I don't think that's the case," says Chasey.

"There will be a lot of people who do some great stuff, but because they can't through the general noise, unfortunately they may not do the sales numbers they need to cover their development costs."

This is not to say Chasey has a downer on the App Store and iPhone - far from it. FinBlade got in pretty early with WordSearch, a simple wordsearch game with tactile controls and impressive production values.

"We wanted to start with something simple to see how it all worked, but we didn't want to have a throwaway product," he says.

"We tried to take the Apple design philosophy of making it simple and elegant, rather than trying to cram too many features in. It's more of a Mac approach than a PC approach. And we think that's paid off, certainly from reading the reviews on the App Store."

Chasey says FinBlade is focused on making games that will work well on the iPhone, rather than simply porting across existing mobile titles, which may not suit the device's touchscreen interface.

He agrees with the widely-held notion that iPhone is turning out to be more of a casual gaming device than expected, too. "The prices have come down to a lot lower level than people expected," he says, as one explanation.

"Over the first three months, there's been downward pressure on prices, although given the revenue share that Apple pay out, and the speed which they do it, you can still make decent money even at a low price point. It will be interesting to see if subsequently that price pressure moves into mobile gaming more generally."

Chasey is also intrigued by the huge popularity of what he terms 'toys' on the App Store, such as virtual lighters, the Koi Pond app, iPint and so on.

"They're selling for a dollar, and people are buying an awful lot of them. But if you pitched that to a mobile carrier, you'd get laughed out of the room. Yet on the App Store, there is some pretty amazing innovation going on with these things. And intriguingly, most of them are coming from indie developers or individuals."

Chasey praises THQ Wireless for the way it chose to work with the two students who developed the PhoneSaber application to make an official version, rather than slapping them with a lawsuit.

Despite his caution about the reputed iPhone goldmine, Chasey says the App Store is undeniably an opportunity for indie developers. "It reminds me of the old days at [previous firm] Iomo, when we were self-publishing with carriers," he says.

"It's an opportunity to do that again, and a chance for indie developers who've tended to focus on work-for-hire to get some of their great ideas out to a broad audience on iPhone, and then maybe even come back and do a publishing deal for it on mobile."

One good thing about the App Store is the way Apple is seemingly as happy to promote games from small developers on the homepage as from the big publishers. FinBlade has received promotion for WordSearch and Tennis Slam, for example.

Chasey hopes this will continue. "Will it over time become a place where the big publishers get all the slots, purely based on their marketing muscle outside the App Store?" he asks. "Or will we continue to see independent developers get promotion?"