When it comes to gaming on the move, the Nintendo DS and the PlayStation Portable recently got to meet a new challenger in the Apple-made iPhone. Both Nintendo and Sony have long regarded the new device as lacking the power and the public needed to compete with the long established handhelds. But now Apple has made the competition personal, claiming at its most recent press conference that the game library for both the
PSP and the DS are limited and that the cost of gaming on those platforms is actually to high.
Philip W. Schiller, who is the senior vice president of worldwide product marketing at Apple, has specifically said that the iPhone and the iPod touch, which is powered by the same operating system, were better at gaming than the
PlayStation Portable and the Nintendo DS. His main point was about the price of videogames, which go up to just 9.99 dollars on the iPhone, with most of them priced much lower and promotions regularly taking them down to 0.99, while the usual price on the handhelds is 39.99.
Apple is also saying that the catalog of games for its products is much larger. There are 3,680 videogames you can pick up for the DS and 607 for the PSP, while Apple offers, through the App Store, 21,178 applications in the Game and the Entertainment categories. Of course, not all of those are actually videogames, but the disparity is still very big.
Apparently, lending support to Apple's claims of superiority were Ben Mattes, from Ubisoft, who demoed Assassin's Creed 2, set to arrive in November, and Travis Boatman from Electronic Arts, who showed how the iPhone played
Madden NFL 10.
Of course, both Sony and Nintendo are taking steps to counter the advances of the iPhone. The upcoming PSP Go! is set to get videogames via digital distribution as does the new DSi. The only big move that can now come from the handheld makers would be to actually cut the prices for games on their devices.
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