Catan is coming to the iPhone

Catan on the iPhone.Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes! The popular board game has finally been submitted to Apple in iPhone form and now awaits approval. For those of you who don’t know – and have been sorely missing out – Settlers of Catan is a resource based board game with several victory conditions. The game has a huge following and even has a couple expansions.

Though there’s no word on pricing, you can almost guarantee I’ll be buying this game. The one big failure? There’s no online system (?!?). That really makes no sense. The game is best enjoyed with friends, so why not give support the iPhone has had for several firmware iterations?

In the ever-increasing deluge of iPhone games, I’m glad to see titles I’ve waited for aren’t slipping past my radar. It’s not so far-fetched to think they might. After all, even major releases can take up to a week to show up in app searches.

  

Portal Coming to Your iPhone?

I can’t say whether or not this video is real, or whether or not that’s actually Valve’s Portal you see running, or pretty much anything about this video other than, “Please, suh, I’d like some moah.” The port could be real, particularly considering how terrible the controls look, though I can’t always match what his fingers are doing to what’s happening on screen. At any rate, take a look and dream a little.

And when you’re done, go grab some cake. I hear it’s delicious.

  

iPhone Gamers Love New Games, Want Them Less Than $2

iPhone app store spread.The folks at PocketGamer.biz recently took a look at the iPhone gaming situation to come away with some cold, hard data about what people are buying and why. I’ll spare you the full report (really I just don’t want to leech all the credit here) and focus instead on some of the more interesting details.

For standards, PG took a snapshot of the top 100 applications and then broke down the results by price, price by rank, games by publisher, and source (new IP, console port, music, movie, etc.).

Pricing was actually different than you might think. While most of the top 100 came in the $.99 category (36 titles), second place went to the $4.99 bracket with 20 titles. But that’s just number of games for each price bracket. Obviously since they are top 100 these are games that are getting downloaded a lot, but how much do the games get played after downloading?

If you look at price by rank, the top 10 games average just $1.89/download. At 11-20, the price drops to $1.19. Of course there are a load of factors that could contribute to the rankings. Are people really playing these cheap games more or are they just deleting them more often and so being prompted to rate more of these games?

Perhaps the most useful statistic, at least to industry developers, is the rate of new downloads and the desire for new IP. Of the top 100 games, 40 were released in June or July (this likely includes a few updates). Another 22 were April or May releases. As for IP, 52 of the top 100 are fresh content, designed just for the iPhone.

If you’re downloading games, where does your allegiance lie? Are you a bargain shopper, only buying apps that are cheap or on sale? Or do you look for the best IPs from hot developers, regardless of price?

  

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