San Francisco’s Moscone Center is best known to gamers as the home of GDC, but it’s also the venue for Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference. It might be less than a quarter the size of GDC, less gamey and rather mellower, but WWDC is hardcore in its own proud terms.

After all, one of the main talking points of Apple’s keynote was Snow Leopard, the latest OS X update, and even at GDC, you won't find many coders talking excitedly about the latest OpenGL or DirectX extensions. Yet in the hotel lounges, parties and bars around 2nd, 3rd and Mission streets it was the gaming group who provided the greatest enthusiasm.

Of course, the announcement of the up revved iPhone 3GS, with a 50 per cent faster new CPU/GPU core and more RAM, was the first headline - and Apple says it has already sold a million of them. The design and commercial opportunities in the 3.0 operating system update for all 40 million iPhones and iPod touches was the real meat of the show, however.

These include the ability to charge for microtransaction additions to paid games. For example Gameloft will be supporting its Asphalt 5 racer with a 99 cent pack including a new track and three new vehicles. In keeping with the business model in its homeland, Korean publisher Com2uS is also expected to add the ability to buy better bats and other customisation items, into Baseball Slugger: Homerun Race 3D.

Another game-changing feature of 3.0 is push notification, which will enable players to send game-related challenges to their friends even if they're not online and don't have the game. Not only will it increase the longevity of a game but it should drive sales and grow community, goes the argument.


_{^{Developer Jason Citron hopes to enable new ways of making game sales with the OpenFeint social networking platform}}

"People drive the sales of games," points out Jason Citron, who as well as being a co-creator of the Aurora Feint series of games, together with partner Danielle Cassley, has also spun out that technology into OpenFeint, a social network platform for iPhone that's already been used by hundreds of developers. "Danielle sends Jason a challenge using content purchased with microtransactions. Jason clicks through the push notification and is prompted to purchase the content Danielle selected so he can play her challenge. With one click of a button, he purchases the content and jumps right into the game," says Citron, explaining how a virtuous circle combining the two 3.0 OS features could work.