EA Mobile : iPhone is hurting Mobile Game Industry

EA Mobile’s VP of worldwide studios Travis Boatman has stated that the iPhone is hurting Mobile Game Industry at CES 2008 in Las Vegas. According to Travis Boatman, iPhone is “a replacement for someone who had a RAZR before. They still want their content but there’s no distribution platform in place so there’s a negative impact on the industry.” The argument is really simple. Buyers of the iPhone are mostly early adopters, which have always been good to help the market evolve by buying the newest and fastest technology first.

Now with the iPhone, the regular mobile games market has no longer access to this group of consumers. If those consumers would have sticked with buying the latest SonyEricsson or Nokia phones, they would have still contributed. On the other side of the story, critics think that the iPhone has triggered interest in smartphones from consumers that else would have never bought one.

The argument is valid, but it feels strange to see it come from EA Mobile as EA Mobile has always been one of the happy few to be developing mobile games for Apple's iPod platforms.