iPhone dominates this year's GDC Mobile Summit
It was pretty much business as usual at the mobile track of the Game Developers Conference back in February 2008. The big targets were mass-market phones using Java and BREW, with just a mention or two of the smartphone platforms of Windows Mobile and BlackBerry. There was talk of Apple's then 9 month old iPhone, but the SDK for developing applications hadn't yet been announced so options for games were very limited. Michel Guillemot of Gameloft commented in his opening keynote that "every iPhone user is one less mobile gamer."
A month later Apple announced their iPhone SDK, demonstrating what it could do with demonstrations from EA Mobile and SEGA. In July 2008, the iPhone App Store opened with well over a hundred games of all types. It was an impressive start, but the market for iPhone games has exploded since then with thousands of options to download to the device.
So it was no surprise that GDC Mobile 2009 was quite different to previous ones. The opening keynote was "Why the iPhone just changed everything" by ng:moco:'s Neil Young. He portrayed everything that came before the iPhone as lame, and set out his reasoning that this device was better than anything before because of better graphics, better networking, better tools for making games and a better system for getting games into the hands of customers. He may have over-egged it a bit, but no-one at GDC denied that the iPhone is significant, even those representing other manufacturers.
On the second day, EA Mobile's Travis Boatman talked more generally about the smartphone expansion, including other newcomers to the scene such as Google's Android operating system. He certainly reflected the opinion that for many game developers there are now more platforms to develop on than ever. In the end though, the closing video showed EA's upcoming iPhone games. They're the ones that matter.
Later that day the IGF (Independent Games Festival) Mobile awards were again dominated by iPhone developers and games: out of 7 categories, 6 were awarded to the platform. That's cheating slightly as one category was for "Best iPhone Game"... but the fact that there was a platform-specific award category says something about how important the industry views iPhone.
For us at Astraware, this is all very heartening stuff. iPhone has turned the smartphone market, our market, from niche to mainstream in a year. It's a good time to be in the business!