Of course, the issue is that such features are more likely to increase the profitability of the top-selling titles at the cost of the bottom feeders. Yet, for the moment, all iPhone developers are happy to be in a game where the opportunities seem so available. For example, within a couple of days of each other, two developers announced they has been the first to sell one million copies of a paid app: Freeverse with Flick Fishing and Firemint with Flight Control.


_{^{Firemint's Flight Control has hit a million paid downloads alongside Freeverse's Flick Fishing}}

The other reason for the optimism is many developers in this space are refugees from the world of mobile games, where innovation and profit has been sucked out of their lives by the constraints of operators and device fragmentation. Now basking in relative meritocracy of Apple's App Store, with its 70:30 revenue split, they see an opportunity to build something big.

It could be argued, however, that the market already has its own nascent Electronics Arts in situ. Formed by ex-EA vice president Neil Young, together with Planet Moon's Bob Stevenson and several other ex-EAites, ngmoco has to date collected $15 million in venture capital and last week claimed Simon Jeffery, Sega’s US president, for its own. Acting as the publisher of first choice to independent iPhone developers, it has successfully bought the polish, presentational and marketing tricks of the console world to the App Store with original content such as London-based Hand Circus' Rolando and Almere, Netherlands-based Rough Cookie's Star Defense.


_{^{Rough Cookie's Star Defense}}

Young, for one, is very bullish about the future. "We take Nintendo as our model. ‘What would Nintendo do?’ is the question we ask ourselves," he states. "We need to make the best possible games we can for this platform. Licences and ports are fine but our focus is on the best games that take full advantage of what this device can do."

And no, he isn't going to be selling his games for 99 cents. "The majority of games that sell more than 400,000 copies cost $5 or over," Young says. "People will pay for quality." Of course, few other companies are quite as well financed as ngmoco, so it could be argued they are the outlier of the App Store.

Indeed, talking to the smaller codeshops, the current fear is price deflation. Also known as the Drop to 99c, this is a direct result of the majority of App Store sales being driven by a game's position in the various national top 100 lists. The problem for developers is maintaining position. The easiest way to do this is to cut the price, perhaps even for day, to drive up sales again. Indeed, the most successful example of this following WWDC was PopCap's four-day sale of Peggle which saw the $5 game drop to 99 cents. The promotion saw the game sell roughly as many copies as it had in the three weeks since launch and hit the number 1 spot. The trick is now labelled by some as 'Doing a Peggle'.

"We couldn't have anticipated the response that saw Peggle shoot straight to the top of the charts," PopCap's director of mobile business development, Andrew Stein, commented. "The 99c sale was just an experiment to see what might happen. This is in line with what we do periodically at PopCap.com."

So, for many developers, there may be trouble ahead. Clearly too many games from too many unexperienced outfits are being created for iPhone and iPod touch: a bubble that looks likely to expand during 2009. But for those with the skill and the luck to create an App Store hit, the rewards are at hand; and for the time being at least, that dream is good enough.