Is the game afoot at Apple?

And it’s yet another foray into the exciting world of Apple and gaming. A couple of game-related stories came out this week, but don’t go putting your Wii or Xbox 360 up on eBay just yet.

First, last Thursday, Download Squad broke a story point out that iTunes contains strings that mention game support for the iPhone.

Whilst we admittedly couldn’t find any strings directly related to the implementation of a U.K. iTunes Video store, two strings certainly caught our eyes:

/* ===== iPhone Game Item Strings ===== */
“4329.001” = “Are you sure you want to remove the selected game from your iPhone?”;
“4329.002” = “Are you sure you want to remove the selected games from your iPhone?”;

Maybe this sounds awfully familiar—and it should. Back in March, when the Apple TV shipped, some sites dug through the same strings to find “evidence” of Apple TV games. Which have not yet materialized.

Now, it would be unparalleled idiocy to argue that games will never come to the Apple TV or the iPhone: that’s a bet that’s pretty much impossible to win. And indeed, the iPhone would seem like a great potential platform for games, or at least third-party developers seem to think.

Fortunately, this leads directly into our next gaming story.

The New York Post reports in its traditionally conservative manner:

Call it the clash of the titans.

Two of the hottest tech companies - Nintendo and Apple - appeared headed for a showdown after Nintendo moved to patent its tilt sensitivity on its best-selling portable system, Nintendo DS - essentially to turn it into mobile Nintendo Wii.

Of course, motion-sensitivity is the hottest thing since lava. But does this mean Apple and Nintendo are necessarily going to lock horns?

In my thoroughly considered opinion: "Nahhhhh." We've seen plenty of rumors about these two companies in the past, and they certainly seem to have much in common. And while I'm sure Apple's investigating the potential of games on the iPhone, they're not about to eat Nintendo's lunch any more than they're about to team up to save the world from the evils of Microsoft.

Look: the DS is a game console. Sure, you can put a web browser on it, but it doesn't make phone calls, it doesn't play music or videos out of the box, or have any number of the iPhone's other numerous functions. And—this is important—it costs $129, a fraction of the iPhone's price.

Likewise, while gaming might be a good value-add for the iPhone, nobody's going to go out and buy it for that reason alone. Saying that the iPhone might compete with the DS is pretty silly: they're just not in the same market, any more than the DS is about to compete with the iPod.

There's a far bigger obstacle here, though, and that's Apple's attitude towards gaming. Despite their repeated assertions that they "get" gaming, they simply don't. It continues to be a field that they view as a niche, but they're not really prepared to spend a lot of time on it other than to say "oh, yeah, you can totally play games on the Mac." That might change in the future, but it hasn't yet. I've gone into this before, and I think everything said there still applies.

I will say this: despite my eye-rolling exasperation with digging through package strings to find positive proof, I do expect Apple to bring games to the iPhone, probably in the same manner as their iPod games. What I find far more interesting about that inevitable development is what it will mean to the folks out there currently hacking their way onto the iPhone: will they be able to hijack or piggyback on the system to deliver their own applications? Will they approach third-party developers about bringing their own games to the system? At the end of the day, the answers to those questions will have a lot more impact on the iPhone than any fictional conflict with Nintendo.

Category: Software

Posted by Dan Moren on Aug 14 2007, 3:26 PM ET

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iPhone illustration by Joe Zeff Design Inc. // Design by Jason Brightman