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What the WWDC iPhone announcements don’t mean for gamers
Chris White
June 9, 2009 2:45 PM ET in Gaming
Yesterday at WWDC Apple talked about its new iPhone, the updated OS and showed off (or rehashed) some cool iPhone apps and hardware. There was a lot of big news but very little surprises along the way. We’re getting a 32GB version, the camera has been improved, turn-based GPS from TomTom was announced and the new iPhone OS will let you interface with other accessories via the dock connecter or Bluetooth connections.
It sounds like some cool stuff, but as a gamer and an iPhone enthusiast addict one of the things they didn’t show was almost as interesting as what they did. While over a billion apps have been installed onto iPhone and iPod Touches and the most significant portion of them being games, Apple still doesn’t seem to have fully embraced the gaming market as much as we had hoped.
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If you’ve spent much time playing with iPhone games you know that it’s brilliant for some things, like racers and puzzle games, and very limiting for others. Like the DS the iPhone has yet to impress me with a solid touch-screen mechanic for playing 3D adventure games or first person shooters. In fact, the lack of even a primitive D-pad makes top down games like the Zelda games on the DS a chore to handle.
With the announcement of hardware accessories at the iPhone OS 3.0 event on March 17th a new hope was kindled that we might see a traditional game controller that you’d place your iPhone in.
While Apple spent little time talking about hardware add-ons today and only briefly reminded the audience of the blood glucose monitor, they missed a great opportunity to get less casual gamers interested in the iPhone and show everyone the versatility of these devices. Maybe we’ll see gamer add-ons like this at or after the launch and I hope 3rd party developers may fill the gap, but clearly Apple still hasn’t fully embraced the gaming audience.
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