Will gaming on the iPhone be successful?

It's a good sign when Apple stores are on record as not having 3g iPhones in stocked. Well, ok, that has very little indication as to how gaming will be like on the iPhone. It does, though, show that there is a high demand, and high demand means lots of users. A developer really wants to target as many users as possible and it should be no different that game developers will only invest in developing software for a product that has the most number of users.

And Apple is setting up the proper environment. Since you can download apps directly from itunes, it makes things really easy. To go along with this, Pinch Media's been aggregating data on both top 100 paid and free applications. Not surprising to me, as of this post, the top five iphone paid applications are all games. If we expand out a bit, seven of the top ten paid applications are games.

But it's not just small publishers that are trying to make a quick buck. Big publishers like EA are releasing versions of AAA titled games on the iphone. Like Spore:



And LucasArts with Star Wars: Force Unleashed



Anti-iPhoners and those who don't see a reason to combine their lame Nintendo DS with a mobile device have been voicing their opinions on how gaming would not work very well since their are no buttons for input feedback. I think the videos above show the pioneering effort in not trying to make the old classic game interfaces work, but really trying to do something different. Games for the iPhone are still in its infant stages. There is potential here.

And if you're not a gamer, you could always just turn it into a light saber.