Pangea's Greenstone: After iPad launch, I'm suffering from i-news burnout

Following on from the iPhone 4.0 OS announcement, we caught up with Brian Greenstone, president and CEO of Apple veteran developer Pangea, to get his opinion on how it could change things.

He was still getting over the crunch that saw the company releasing five iPad launch titles though.

Pocket Gamer: What's your reaction to the iPhone 4.0 SDK announcement?

Brian Greenstone: Hah. Honestly my reaction was "I need a break". I worked my tail off for the iPad launch, so I think I'm suffering from i-news burnout. I decided to not even think about it until I take a nice long vacation.

How will Game Center change things?

Sounds like it could be trouble for the other leaderboard systems like OpenFeint et al, but I think it's great to see Apple getting into this. I can't wait to use it.

Do you think the iAd will change things in terms of the viability ad-funded games?

I doubt it. It seems that quality games perform better as purchased games rather than ad-based, but that could change in the future. I think in-app advertising does better for the smaller games that would have cost 99 cents anyways.

More generally, considering the iPad launch, how have you found it to-date?

It's great so far. I much prefer playing games on it over my iPhone, and that goes for every app, not just games.

Finally, iPhone 4.0 SDK marks further fragmentation of the iDevice platform. At what point do you think this becomes significant?

Yes, I'm a bit worried about it, but these things always work out in the end. Even the OS 3.2 for the iPad caused some fragmentation with our code, but it's not too bad.

Thanks to Brian for his time.