Games developers and publishers have reacted with huge enthusiasm to the iPhone 3.0 software upgrade announced last night by Apple.
We've been canvassing games firms since the announcement, and it has to be said that 98 per cent of their comments are positive: they're champing at the bit to get cracking with the 1,000 new APIs outlined at yesterday's event.
Here's a snapshot of some of the views we've elicited, with links to the full articles:
Tim Harrison (ex EA Mobile)
"While the wider mobile industry struggles to adopt and adapt to the new realities of Mobile Web 2.0, on a Tuesday morning in March, Apple has gone and created a 3.0rd." (read more)
Jill Braff (Glu Mobile)
"The addition of these features offers game publishers a huge amount of creativity and freedom to take social gaming and personalisation to a whole new level." (read more)
Trip Hawkins (Digital Chocolate)
"There were so many new features it made my head spin. Peer-to-peer gaming, voice chat, access to the iPod library, streaming, landscape typing, push notification, search across apps, shake to undo, and new billing models caught my attention." (read more)
Paul Farley (Tag Games)
"Apple is not only listening to the development community but actively encouraging it, a stark contrast to the traditional world of mobile game development where most mobile operators and handset manufacturers still fail to provide a compelling development or commercial environment for game creation." (read more)
Michael Schade (Fishlabs)
"It's good news for everyone who targets a smaller group of high-end users and wants to monetize over time rather than once as pay-per-download." (read more)
John Chasey (FinBlade)
"Given price pressures within the app store to keep prices low, micro-billing will provide an opportunity to up-sell additional content and so improve the per-user revenue. This also works well from the consumer perspective - initial prices are likely to remain low, with the option to buy extras if they feel the application is worth it." (read more)
Kyu Lee (Gamevil USA)
"Updates and overall play-time is going to be a much more important factor in the future for iPhone games, since a lot of these publishers will see the ARPU increasing across a handful of quality games, instead os seeing revenues coming from a large quantity of mediocre games." (read more)
Nigel Little (Distinctive Developments)
"We're really excited about the push notifications and how we can use those to alert players to what other players have been doing within our social games... we could do team based games where you and your friends play as a team and you can let your other team members know that you need their help ASAP to succeed." (read more)
Brett Seyler (GarageGames)
"I think there's huge potential to mash up music and games in a really innovative way, particularly when the app can access a user's library of music and video." (read more)
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Contributing Editor
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)
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