News

More iPhone 3.0 reactions: Playfish, Connect2Media, Tapulous...

And they're just as positive

More iPhone 3.0 reactions: Playfish, Connect2Media, Tapulous...
We've been canvassing the opinions of games developers and publishers about yesterday's iPhone 3.0 announcement, and they've been very positive so far.

Just check what Glu Mobile, Digital Chocolate, Fishlabs, FinBlade, Distinctive Developments, Tag Games, Gamevil and GarageGames had to say for proof.

And there's more where those came from. Here's some more bite-sized reactions from the iPhone games community. Starting with Kristian Segerstrale, CEO of social games company Playfish.

"We're delighted by the announcement and very excited to make full use of the new functionalities," he says.

"We're most excited by the micro-payment options and the push notifications. These will really differentiate the iPhone as a gaming platform from other handhelds and mobile devices. Enabling the free-to-play and persistent gaming models will open up the door to new kinds of games on the platform and social games and mmos in particular will benefit."

Meanwhile, Pete Scott, CTO at Connect2Media, also highlights the micro-payment features, among other facets to iPhone 3.0.

"Key for me from a games Dev point of view is the Peer to Peer connectivity and Micro payments from within the game," he says.

"Personally I love the idea of getting access to the owners music library also. This will bring together a future of many interesting on device music apps, from mixing, to different ways of analysing the music library. Oh and of course playing your tunes in the games."

The music features will be sure to benefit developers like Tapulous, which has been going great guns with its Tap Tap Revenge family of games. However, that company's CEO Bart Decrem is equally excited about the micro-payments in iPhone 3.0.

"The announcement is a big move forward for the platform," he says. "The new API calls will let us build even richer games and apps, and the ability to sell items and subscriptions within the games opens up terrific new business opportunities."

And finally, for now, we asked Jason Spero, AdMob's VP and GM North America, for his opinions on iPhone 3.0. Yes, he's excited too.

"It has a lot of features that consumers have asked for such as copy and paste or the ability to send photos via MMS," he says.

"It also has some great features for developers and the gaming community. I’m most interested in the news that Apple will now support in-app purchases. This opens up a lot of new possibilities for developers, they can offer apps via subscription or offer free games where consumers can easily purchase additional levels."

We'll have more reaction throughout today, so keep checking back on our iPhone 3.0 section for more views from the industry.
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.)