The staggering size of iOS's game collection
How big is iOS as a gaming platform? I wondered to myself on an idle rainy afternoon. After all, we hear a lot about how the App Store has passed eleventy gajillion downloads, or how it makes people richer than astronauts …
Context & Ripple Effects
The arc here runs backwards: in July 2007 GigaOM was asking where the iPhone games were, and as recently as March 2010 books still outnumbered games on the iPhone. TUAW's rainy-afternoon tally marks the inversion of that question — iOS has gone from gaming afterthought to a catalog big enough that its size is the story.
First-order effects
- Apple gets a fresh proof point for App Store marketing: after Fortune's October challenge to the 300,000-apps figure, an independent count of just the games category gives the company a defensible scale claim rather than a contested aggregate.
- Game developers on iOS now compete inside a category large enough that visibility, not production, becomes the binding constraint on sales.
Second-order effects
- As raw catalog size stops being differentiating news in itself, attention shifts from how many titles exist to which ones surface — making App Store placement and ranking mechanics the real battleground for developers' fortunes.
- Rival platforms measuring themselves against iOS are pushed to report their own store counts, turning catalog size into a standard competitive metric across mobile ecosystems.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, portable gaming's center of gravity moves from dedicated handheld devices to general-purpose phones, with store breadth — not device specs — as the axis on which platforms are judged.
- A catalog this dense structurally favors low-priced, high-volume distribution models, pressuring premium game pricing on mobile toward impulse-buy territory.
The trend: Mobile gaming is consolidating around app-store ecosystems where the sheer size of a platform's catalog, rather than any single title or device, defines its competitive position.