Anyone else find this confusing, so now developers can make games using flash for the apple store, but those games still won't work on Iphones/touches/pads? What is the point?

"the company says App Store developers have earned over one billion dollars collectively from App Store sales."

The overall revenue of the Appstore including Apple's share since it's launch was, in June 2010, $1.43 billion, this breaks down to roughly $477 million per year. The global video games industry is right now at roughly $40 billion a year. When I consider, that not every App in Apple's store is a game, the video games revenues in the Appstore are even lower. So I would say, Apple's platform is not very important for the worldwide games industry.

@Christian: Have you taken into consideration the average price point of an iOS game versus a console or PC game? That closes the gap considerably. Still, it might be more beneficial to speak in terms of units sold, though I don't know if such information would ever be forthcoming.

@ Ted

No, it doesn't close the gap considerably, cause developing Street Fighter IV for the iOS costs as much as developing it for another platform. For the revenues, the price of an App is irrelevant. If you divide the $1 billion with the 250k Apps, you get roundabout $1350 per App. Let's say for fun, that two thirds of all Apps are free (I don't have a number here), then it would make a revenue of $4050 per App. Even without the numbers of units sold, I can see, here, that the vast majority of commercial Apps never will become profitable.

What is wrong in my numbers is the fact, that in the $40 billion the hardware is included, you have to extract it, but even if it would make up 50% of all revenues (which is probably to high), the Appstore remains insignificant in comparsion to the revenues of the rest of the games industry.

"Citing security concerns, Apple has instead preferred to adopt other open standards like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript."

You may be referencing a different article, but i distinctly remember Apple's claim against allowing 3rd-party development tools was over a supposed user experience concern. Now they're trying to rewrite history by claiming it was a security concern? Don't be fooled.

- Ryan

Convictions 0 capitalism 100

I kind of understand where they're coming from with this debate. It's a huge security risk for the phones to be able to download and execute arbitrary code (iVirus anyone?). But did it really need to take so long to come up with this resolution? I'm sure the investigation had a lot to do with it.

Still this is Apple backpedaling, retrenching its conflict with Adobe along the "security" front having lost the battle to exclude third party tools entirely.

I might be reading this blurb wrong;
"Adobe Labs previously offered the Adobe AIR Packager for iPhone..."

They still offer the packager. A final release is included with Flash CS5. Adobe stance was that they'd no longer offer support for it, or offer any further updates after Apple's last minute SDK changes last year.

Whether is is backpedaling or not, it's still excellent news for iOS developers or potential iOS developers - especially for 2D games, given that I've found Unity to be a little weak for development in that end of the pool.