It's no secret that Apple's iPhone and iPod touch have courted a lot of major game developers. EA Sports now releases App Store titles for nearly all of its annual franchises, THQ has "Star Wars: Trench Run" hitting the platform this month and countless others from Disney Interactive to 2K and Ubisoft now have high-profile releases out. Apple may be ready to expand its own development capabilities, however, if a recent job posting is any indication.

Read more...

UPDATE: Storm8 has responded to the lawsuit's accusations and issued a statement on Storm8.com.

Original Story: A class-action lawsuit filed in San Francisco wants to take iPhone game developer Storm8 to task for what it calls "malicious software code." The suit accuses Storm8 of exploiting a backdoor method to retrieve users' phone numbers without their permission in games such as "iMobsters" and "Vampires Live." We reached out to Apple for a comment, and though the representative we spoke wasn't familiar with the case, he did articulate Apple's position on the practice Storm8 has been accused of.

Read more...

Up until this point "Lite" purchases from Apple's App Store needed to be exited in order to go back and purchase a game's fully loaded big brother. A change of policy has shifted those constraints, however, and iPhone and iPod touch gamers can now expect to see in-game buttons that immediately initiate purchases.

Read more...

Apple made a splash yesterday with their iPod/iTunes centric press conference in San Francisco. The big takeaways: a new iPod Nano (with a video camera), an update to iTunes, a bigger iPod Touch and a firmware update for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Oh, and a prettier/cheaper iPod Shuffle. Lots to cover, certainly. Lets look at the iPod stuff first.

Read more...

Over the weekend, "Peggle" on iPhone was lowered from five dollars to just one. (Sorry if you missed it, the price is back up to five.) As I mentioned previously, it wasn't just PopCap being nice. No, it was just their way of "hacking" the iPhone AppStore, which is overly biased towards best-selling titles, listing those apps with the highest sales right at the top.

The issue with this method is that the top-selling list is determined by the number of times that app has been purchased, not the total amount of money that app has made. Therefore, more expensive apps are at a huge disadvantage, getting pushed down by the myriad of fart simulators that sell for a buck.
Read more...