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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Gaming, Software, Developer, iPhone, App Store, SDK, iPod touch

iPhone is dominating independent gaming

Our friends at Joystiq make a very insightful and very telling discovery: the iPhone more or less owns the finalist list for the 2009 Independent Games Festival Mobile category. 11 of the 14 contestants aren't on the Nintendo DS or PSP -- they're built and played on the iPhone and the iPod touch. The popular Fieldrunners and Igloo Games' Dizzy Bee are standouts, but even innovative games like Galcon and the pseudogame experience Ruben and Lullaby are being honored with nods.

Very, very telling -- the relatively low cost of entry into the App Store and the versatility of Apple's SDK makes the iPhone/iPod touch a dream platform for independent game developers, and clearly, even with less than a year of development time, Apple's handheld is making a big splash in the industry. Sure, there's still a few pricing hiccups that need to be worked out to get bigger developers on board in a big way, but for smaller and single person independent game developers, there's never been a better platform on which to make and market your games.

Filed under: Video, iTunes

iTunes creates new venue for Indy distribution

Variety reports that independent video producers can now sell through iTunes. The first indy video production, a 40-minute snowboarding feature, represents the first iTunes content outside the studio system. This opens doors for small business videographers to market their content and I suspect that video tutorials may be a big growth area for content. Let me point out that the video that debuted (it's called "That") is by no means an amateur production. It creates a new venue for distribution previously unavailable through video podcasting.

Filed under: Audio, iTS

Who needs a record label? Submit your own music to the iTMS with Tunecore

Are you a musician with some tracks that deserve their time in the iTMS spotlight? No one's promising you'll make the Top Songs list, but Tunecore can at least help you take a shot.

While Apple offers an online application through which you can ask them to 'consider your music for the iTMS,' Tunecore (notice the hip 'beta' marking) can actually submit your music to not only the iTMS, but Rhapsody, MusicNet and Napster too. They offer what I would consider a reasonable one-time fee structure (meaning: the don't take a % of each song/album sale), and they can add your music to a number of international stores (not just the U.S.) with 'more coming soon!' One last feature to note about their service which might be music to indie musicians' ears: you keep all the rights and ownership of your music, i.e. - Tunecore a middle-man who actually remains a middle-man.

This sounds like a great service. I hope more musicians can use it to hop on the digital distribution bandwagon.

[thanks Andre Dupont!]

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