The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

I'm here at E3 in Los Angeles all this week (come say hi at the Joystiq meetup tonight if you're in town!). Yesterday, I got to sit down with Brad Pitser, the Director of Global Production for THQ Wireless, a company that makes games for mobile platforms like the iPhone. Pitser has helped oversee two iPhone games so far: De Blob (now on the App Store) and Star Wars' Force Unleashed (coming out later this year -- Joystiq has my impressions of both). He said that developing for the iPhone so far has been "a dream." They've partnered with Apple to publish on the iPhone and iPod touch as much as they can. "Apple was interested in our brands," Pitser said, "and we were interested in their platform."

One concern he does have about the App Store so far is the pricing -- "everyone thinks $9.99 is too much," he told me. THQ released De Blob at the $6.99 price point. He says THQ has a lot of licensing fees and costs to pay for every game they make, and when those games compete with software that sells for 99 cents, they don't necessarily have a money-making proposition. But at the same time, he'd rather let the market figure things out -- the App Store has a lot of settling down to do, and Pitser is sure that companies will find their place in the price plan soon enough.

I asked him what he thought of what he'd seen in the software that wasn't his, and he said he really enjoyed the iPint visual gag, the UrbanSpoon restaurant finder, and Aurora Feint (all very nice choices). It's great to have a bigger company like THQ interested in getting some good licenses on the iPhone, and hopefully we'll see more come out of Pitser and the division he oversees.