AppStore posts

Booyah is an App Store company with quite a few lessons in its past already. The founders are former developers at Blizzard (they worked on both Diablo and World of Warcraft before setting off on their own), and after their first app, Booyah Society, didn't exactly strike gold on the App Store, they went back to the drawing board on their idea of "real life achievements," and have done much better with their latest app, MyTown -- it's one of the top grossing apps around, with more users and higher engagement than the popular Foursquare.

We got to sit down with CEO Keith Lee for an interview at GDC, and he told us about what they learned from Booyah Society, why Booyah is convinced that real-life social gaming is where it's at, and what they think of the iPad (and what Blizzard thinks of the iPhone). Read on for more.

We stopped by the Capcom Fight Club party here at GDC 2010 last night, and in addition to playing the new game, we also got to talk to producer Takeshi Tazuka. Actually, we got to talk to his translator -- Tazuka only speaks Japanese, and I only speak English, so the interview was done with a middleman in between.

But even with the language barrier, we did get some good chat in about the new game, Capcom's future plans for the iPhone, and what Tazuka thinks about making a game like this for the iPad. Read on for more.

The number of eBooks in the App Store has surpassed the number of games for the first time, and the spread is widening. Mobclix, a mobile device advertising agency, reports that as of last month, there were over 27,000 eBook apps while games were relegated to the runner-up position of 25,400 apps. Over the last reported month, new introductions of eBook apps more than doubled that of games (158 eBook versus 71 game apps).

There are a number of reasons being kicked around to explain this phenomenon. It's easier to churn out an eBook than a game app. There are more free eBook than gaming apps, since many of the eBooks are out-of-copyright classics or collections of free content; this lowers the cost of development. Once an eBook engine is built it's fairly trivial to use the framework for another book. Currently there are over 10 times more free eBook apps than paid ones. It's different in gaming where paid apps outstrip free ones by over 2 to 1.
Note: One source contradicts another on the above point, so consider it removed.

These eBook apps will, of course, work on an iPad, but the Apple idea is to have you use one eBook reader and that would be iBooks. Jason Kincaid of Techcrunch, admittedly with no background evidence, posits that there may be an eBook purge coming. It would be very un-Apple to have an iPad owner searching for a copy of Treasure Island, and letting them find over 25 apps with differing interfaces and many of them free.

This could be confusing for new iPad owners, and more to the point, Apple can't monetize it. It doesn't sound unreasonable that Apple will do whatever it takes to make iBooks the eReader of choice at the expense of the plethora of current eBook apps. They will be doing it in the name of providing a simpler and more enjoyable user experience, but of course you can't pocket what you can't sell.

It will be fascinating to watch the eBook market about two months from now, after the first iPads have been delivered, and to see what Apple has planned.

[via The Guardian]