All hail the iPhone Gaming Goldrush?

UK downloadable games studio Doublesix has predicted a huge boom in the iPhone games market, revealing that every major games company is clamouring to produce content for Apple’s mobile phone.

Inspired by the booming sales of Apple games content, including the 300,000 in 20 days sales of Sega’s Super Monkey Ball, ‘everybody who has money to spend on games development is looking at the iPhone space’ according to studio head James Brooksby in an interview with Develop.

Talking as part of an interview covering the studio’s first year of business, Brooksby discusses the changing attitudes towards digitally distributed games amongst publishers – and says that much of publisher activity is centered around iPhone, with passion for the platform amongst the industry being "unbelievably strong".

Doublesix, whose business includes a mix of work-for-hire and original IP projects, is has been solicited for iPhone games with publishers desperate to get games ready by the end of the year.

"If the mood change from cold reception to hot perception had to take a year for Xbox Live Arcade, publishers have been switched on to iPhone in just two months," explained Brooksby. "It’s ridiculously fast, going from publishers’ very cold ‘we’re thinking about it’ point of view to a queue of people saying ‘let’s do something, can you get it done by Christmas?’"

He added: "Anybody and everybody who has money to spend on games development is looking at the iPhone space. There is no one – except for Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, obviously – that hasn’t asked us about it. We were talking to Apple in early spring and we had a similar view to everyone else – we weren’t sure where it would go and thought it could go the way of mobile games. But we had a four-hour meeting with Apple and our eyeballs were well and truly widened; theirs too because they are still learning a lot about games."

"The iPhone story is going to be huge – the Monkey Ball numbers have made people site up and take notice."

But Brooksby said that the opportunity to capitalise on the popularity of games content for iPhone lies as much with developers as it does publishers: "With iTunes being the foremost popular digital distribution platform I think it’s going to just get bigger and bigger. It’s also a perfect route for self-publishing."

Click here to read the full interview.