The iPhone for sure shook the mobile industry, but now people are claiming that it will also affect the mobile gaming one. Time just published an article on that line titled Can the iPhone Rule Gaming?.
The numbers they present are pretty interesting. Here is a quote:
The cell-phone gaming market is ripe for the picking. While millions of people play games on the portable Nintendo DS and Sony PSP every day, fewer than 10% of cell-phone users in the U.S. do the same on their phones, according to Nielsen Mobile. What’s more, the average cell-phone gamer spends just $8 a year on new games, versus an estimated $45 a year for users of the PSP and $65 yearly for DS players.
I certainly can see the average money spent by mobile gamers on the rise with the introduction of the iPhone, but I don’t see it threatening the market of Nintendo DS. Nokia has tried in the past with N-Gage, and we all know how it went…
Hardcore mobile gamers don’t buy the iPhone (they are supposedly younger and don’t go around locking themselves in a 2 year phone contract), and hardcore iPhone users only play gamers occasionally while on the run.
In the future when mobile phones converge with personal computers more heavily we might see phones becoming game platforms, but I don’t think this will happen over the next year.