By Anil Mohan Lecture on the business of iPhone games for an undergraduate class at Indiana University, Bloomington

1. iPhoneGames

2. Games are available in your pocket, without needing to buy a separate device.

3. Convergence http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftf4riVJyqw&feature=related

4. The Big Numbers Addressable base of 50m+ devices 30m iPhones and 20m iPod touches More than 3 billion App Store downloads 15 of the top 20 Top Grossing Apps on the App Store are games Of the 65,000 available applications, roughly 11,000 are games (compare to 732 Xbox360 games) The iPhone gaming market controls $250 million USD in revenue since its launch in July of 2008, making it larger than any console’s digital game service (XBLA, PSN, WiiWare/VC)

5. PlayStation Portable took 3 years to ship 25 million units

6. The equation

7. 30% cut that Apple demands in return for providing the purchasing infrastructure and delivery platform Convergence – the delivery platform is the same device as the playing platform Developers are self-publishing via iTunes

8. Developers Striking It Rich 10m Paid iPhone games sold by Gameloft since the launch of the App Store $1,687 Revenues per hour of development time forNimbleBit’s Scoops ($269,929 total) 2m Tap Tap Revenge 3 downloads in a week last Christmas after going free 10 days How long it took Playmesh to rack up 1m free downloads of iFarm 13.5m Downloads of Backflip Studios games in seven months ($1.75m of revenue) 79,422 Doodle Jump’s sales on Christmas Day alone www.iphonegamesbulletin.com

9. http://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=5113

10. Mobile games represent about 25 percent of the entire game development community, or more than twice the 12 percent from before. Apple's presence is believed to have spurred on most of the growth 19 percent of all game developers are writing for the iPhone and iPod touch. The figure is more than twice as high as for the DS and PSP

11. Xbox 360/PS3 Game ≈ 350,000 person hrsiPhone Game ≈ 2,000 person hrs

12. How the iPhone market works Most games get lost in the clutter of so many iPhone apps The market is very top heavy – between 10 and 15% of iPhone gaming titles take up 90% of revenue Success is short-lived 72% of games still played after 30 days But only 23% after 60 days, and 16% after 90 days

14. iTunes AppStore ‘Top 100 list’ is the most popular way of reaching users, becoming a marketing tool

15. Because developers need to keep apps cheap to make sure that download levels are high enough to get on the top lists, they have less incentive to invest a lot of time and money in creating higher quality apps.

18. iPhonevs Android Android is an Open-Source mobile OS Customisable UI – across many devices and manufacturers Android Market – similar business model to AppStore, except no approval process for apps Currently 20,000 apps available for Google's Android