

Japanese Company to Buy iPhone Game Developer (Ngmoco for $400M) - credo
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/technology/13social.html

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credo
Besides everything else, Android (and now Windows Phone 7) will have to
compete with news stories like this one.

The big hits (Angry Birds earning > $1 million per month, Ngmoco acquisition
etc.) tend to be around the iPhone.

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hristov
Yeah, one thing the iPhone will always have going for it, is that people on
there are much more willing to spend money.

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cletus
I think you're partially right.

iPhone users shell out more cash than Android users _seem to_. I think this is
partially a function of the maturity of the platform. I'm including iTunes in
this, which has been around for nearly a decade. I don't know about other
countries but you can buy iTunes credit in every supermarket, petrol station
and department store in Australia. That stuff matters. Compare it to the
relatively high barrier of Google Checkout.

So yes iPhone users spend more but that's at least in part because Apple makes
it easy to spend money in the iTunes ecosystem.

But iOS has one HUGE thing over Android when it comes to games: consistency of
hardware. You cannot understate how important this is.

It's not simply a question of different resolutions but Android handsets have
different chipsets, CPUs, amounts of memory, OpenGL support and so on.

Another massive advantage iOS has is... the iPod Touch. Lots of these have
been sold? 100+ million? Lots of these are portable gaming consoles. This is
something no other platform has. Parents don't often buy pre-teens phones but
they will buy them iPods.

Windows Phone 7 _might_ be able to replicate this ecosystem in time. They have
the Zune and the Xbox (and Xbox Live) ecosystems available. But I believe that
Android will either always struggle with this problem or will struggle with it
for years, playing second fiddle to iOS as a gaming platform.

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masklinn
> I don't know about other countries but you can buy iTunes credit in every
> supermarket, petrol station and department store in Australia.

Very easy to find in western europe as well.

> Another massive advantage iOS has is... the iPod Touch. Lots of these have
> been sold? 100+ million?

That's total iOS devices (120 millions, announced by Apple in early
september). Asymco[0]'s estimates are 45.2 million iPod Touch sold as of early
september.

But yes, it is a very good point and one Gruber has wondered about a few times
so far: neither Android nor WP7 have an equivalent of the Touch so far, and it
_is_ a major force for sales.

[http://www.asymco.com/2010/09/03/ipod-touch-made-
up-37-7-per...](http://www.asymco.com/2010/09/03/ipod-touch-made-
up-37-7-percent-of-all-ios-devices-sold-so-far/)

~~~
danilocampos
What Gruber misses is that the iPod touch is a freebie Apple gets thanks to
the virtuous cycles they've created elsewhere in their business.

Apple has both an outstanding content channel and an instant payment
mechanism. Selling content is easy. Which means they get great content to
sell: music, movies, TV, and now, applications.

There's as much demand for content as for hardware in Apple land. Apple makes
a killing on the hardware, gives most of the content revenue to partners, and
everyone is happy. So you slip in an iPod touch, and boom: more content
consumption, more hardware sold.

Without compelling content, who needs a non-phone Android device? Without an
amazing instant payment mechanism, who wants to make great content for
Android?

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kristofferR
Wow, this is fascinating. ngmoco was founded only two years ago and it's
already being sold for $400M. I wonder how it would have turned out if they
didn't get iFunded.

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jrockway
Finally a Perl-using company on HN: <http://www.slideshare.net/notolab/dena-
loves-perl>

~~~
rgrieselhuber
Perl is big in Japan with a quite active user community. Mixi.jp was also
mostly written in Perl.

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thomie
For free access to this article and more, you must be a registered member of
NYTimes.com.

~~~
ronnier
My little side project works great for this:

[http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/...](http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/technology/13social.html)

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alexknight
Shit damn those numbers are huge. Congrats to Ngmoco for sure.

