Crytek is a well known company for the popular titles Crysis and Far Cry, available for the PC. Crytek’s CEO Cevat Yerli, made several comments about the iPhone and how it is providing an actual “disservice to gaming” and it’s industry.“iPad and iPhone are both doing a real disservice to game prices by allowing games at such low price points– it is an issue the industry has to address at some point.”

Yerli also stated,

“The social and mobile spaces are certainly something we’ve been looking at for a while now. Well, we’ll have to see what time brings, but that’s all I can say right now,” and “I think the App Store changes the perception of game prices, which I really don’t like. It’s pushing out games at such a low price that it distorts the perception of what a game should be priced at”.

Whether or not you agree with Yerli’s comments is debatable, but he does make some great points. Apple’s handful of iDevices has changed the gaming industry and how customers are viewing titles, even though porting a game for a mobile smartphone is much different than a console version.

To the consumer it comes down to a pricing scheme, something that has been quite ugly in the App Store. The iPad’s “cheap” price point seems to be stuck at $4.99 and the iPhone at $0.99. Yerli commented

“If you look at someone who now takes a casual interest in games; they can get their iPhone and iPad games for something like $4.99, and that drives down sales on mobile platforms, and that in turn will drive down sales of handhelds, and eventually all this pressure will drive down the prices of full console retail games”.

I’m not quite sure if it will “drive down sales of handhelds” as Yerli states because companies like Gameloft, Electronic Arts, Disney, Ngmoco and others seem to be doing strong and continue to bring new titles to iDevices and a continual basis. I guess only time will tell us what the true fate of smartphones and the gaming industry really is.

[Develop Online]

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