iGame Radio

I’m now catching up with news articles that I missed last week on vacation, and this week at Casual Connect. So here are a few tidbits that you might have missed out on, too.

EA’s 8lb Gorilla: Name recognition means everything…Casual Connect even had a panel on naming your game…and EA knows it. That’s why they’ve put together an iPhone game studio named 8lb Gorilla. With the 800lb Gorillas in the tech marketplace battling it out (i.e. Google and Microsoft), I suppose it’s not surprising that someone is going to creating a mini-Gorilla to compete somewhere. EA is a dominator in the game development/publishing scene, so the name fits. The real question is, will the 8lb Gorilla go smashing the Indie developers currently holding their own in the iPhone game marketplace?

The Key to a hit iPhone game…fast response time?: Pocket God, an iPhone game that was released in April of 09, has garnered 1.2 million downloads and as much as $18,000 a day. Produced by Bolt Creative, a two-man team that worked on the game mostly part-time, Pocket God can offer a case study for how an iPhone game could become a hit. As studio founder Dave Castelnuevo said, ““I found that if I responded to what they [players] wanted quickly, they would fall in love with us.”

King.com Staggers into the iPhone Migration: Yeah, the article talks about how King.com has released their new game, Amazon Survival, for the iPhone, joining the iPhone migration. But I was just at Casual Connect, and King was there pushing what they always push…their online casual games scene. Not a single mention of their iPhone game. If they are joining the iPhone migration, they’re staggering their way forward.

And, in the Idle Click category:

I read the iPhone Games Bulletin by Stuart Dredge daily, and he has a section in there that is just food for thought. The other day, he wrote, “My days as an analyst are numbered – Morgan Stanley has someone more than half my age writing research reports. Admittedly, he’s a 15-year-old intern… Matthew Robson has written a report for Morgan Stanley on what teenagers like (iPlayer, Wii, mobile phones) and don’t like (Twitter, newspapers, paying for music). Call me uncharitable, but does the kind of teenager who’d write a research report for Morgan Stanley really know what his peers are up to?”

Er, would you like some cheese to go with that whine there, Stuart? C’mon, are they going to hire a thirty-something to find out what teens like? And by the same thinking, would a thirty-something who wrote research reports for Morgan Stanley really know what *his* peers are up to? Don’t worry, Stuart…no one’s retiring you just yet.