The first wave of iPhone games was dominated by longtime Mac developers such as Freeverse and Pangea and well funded startups like Tapulous and ngmoco.

The second wave grew to tsunami scale as the rest of the gaming world from mobile publishers to console developers, one-man bands and students piled into the gold rush.

Now however the third generation of releases onto the App Store is being shaped by more subtle forces - the rise of the boutique publisher.

Smaller more beautiful?

Of course, we've already seen the likes of Chillingo - as well as the aforementioned ngmoco and Freeverse - set themselves as iPhone-specific publishers with greater or lesser degrees of success.

Certainly they've put out some great games, but they've found it much harder to maintain premium pricing in the manner of larger outfits such as EA Mobile or Gameloft, or intellectual property specialists such as PopCap or Digital Chocolate.

But such is the volume of games now being poured - and going unnoticed - a range of smaller companies is emerging to aid in the production of better iPhone games, and their discovery on the App Store.

Transformers

Some of these companies are already well known in mobile circles.

German mobile publisher and developer Handy Games is one example, while Scottish developer Tag Games has just announced its entry to iPhone publishing.

UK Java aggregator Thumbstars is another company hoping to transfer its skills in a related industry onto the App Store.

Each of these companies stresses their focus will be perhaps a dozen games a year; making sure their output is polished, free of embarrassing bugs or issues that will fail Apple's  notoriously fickle approval process, as well as being supported by solid PR and marketing activities.

Change is coming

Of course, such statements are much, much harder to fulfill in the rough and tumble of development and business but equally the current pressure in terms of too many developers releasing too many games is unsustainable and means it's a change that has to happen.

The App Store remains a meritocracy for sure but the bottomline is, the more people you have on your side, the more likely your game is to get noticed.

And despite what many developers think about publishers, they've always been very good at getting themselves noticed.