July 27th, 2009 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: iOS | No Comments »
Recently, Fishlabs released their Barclaycard Waterslide Extreme advertgame on the Ap Store. Within the first 5 days, the game was downloaded 2 million times and the company gathered some interesting demographics from it.
The most popular device is still the iPhone 3G at 38.2%, closely followed by the 2nd gen iPod Touch. The third spot is taken by the iPhone 3GS (12.7%). Fourth is the iPod Touch 1st gen (7.2%) and last the original iPhone (4.0%).
As Fishlabs points out on their blog, creating games which use iPhone 3GS specific hardware and openGL API's isn't a smart move at the moment. The market seems too small to make a quick return on investment.
When it comes to iPhoneOS, there are still users out there with version 2.2 (4.2%), but the majority has finally upgraded to 3.0 (57.5%). The remaining 38,2% is on version 2.2.1.
“If you are up for an app (game) with the new iPhone OS 3.0 features you face about 60% of the total potential user base. Still quite a lot people you can reach out to but it will be very hard to rise to the top 25 if your thrust of downloads is cut by up to 40% (some may upgrade for killer apps, though) compared to any competing OS 2.x app. For sure, Apple will promote apps (games) with OS 3.0 features to compensate that. Seems like risky business once the promotion has ended, though. We haven’t decided yet when to launch our first iPhone game utilizing OS 3.0 features. Perhaps launching a game with OS 2.x features first and when the hype is over running an update with OS 3.0 features is a good idea. Of course, this won’t work for apps (games) that rely on OS 3.0 features completely.”
