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Sega and Apple has squashed any doubts over the iPhone’s viability as a platform to make games for – the two have revealed that over 300,000 people have bought the Monkey Ball game for the device in just 20 days.
At $9.99 a pop, that works out to $3m revenue in less than a month – figures which legitimise the iPhone as a development platform, Sega’s US boss says.
"That’s a substantial business," Simon Jeffery, president of Sega America, told the Wall Street Journal. "It gives iPhone a justifiable claim to being a viable gaming platform."
The details come as part of a larger report which shows the AppStore has generated a huge $30m in sales in its first month.
And if iTunes’ non-music and video sales stay at their current pace, with $1m being spent on games and other applications each day, Apple will be seeing at least $360m pass through its online store each year.
It could in fact go even higher, claimed Apple CEO Steve Jobs
"This thing’s going to crest a half a billion, soon," he said.
"Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time. I’ve never seen anything like this in my career for software,"
But much of the money goes into the pocket of content creators, not Apple, thanks to the 70/30 revenue split which sees developers take home 70 per cent of the profits made from the sale of their iPhone/iPod Touch applications.
