Sony has promised its fans a brand new portable PlayStation. But the launch of such a product has been put off for now. The PSP was a huge hit, but was followed by a moderately successful PS Vita. The PS Vita 2 might not make it to the stores at all, due to the “unfriendly” climate on the gaming market dominated by smartphones.

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Just look at the green slice on that pie chart. That’s exactly where Sony wishes the PSP was. Instead, it’s Apple. Yes, Apple. I never thought I would see the day that a computer manufacturer was stealing mobile market share from Nintendo but here we are. In just 21 months Apple has managed to snag 19% of the mobile market by revenue.

It’s a pretty impressive stat, considering the lower price of software for the iPhone OS. Can you imagine the number of transactions involved? The really bad news in this story is for Sony, whose revenues are down almost 50% from last year. The PSP Go was obviously not a hit – not that anyone expected it to be – and there hasn’t been much in the way of software to encourage any newcomers to the platform.

As far as total revenue goes, the iPhone OS is now 5% of the total market share, including consoles. If that’s not something for Apple to be happy about, I don’t know what it would take.

Source: Flurry

Reuters ran an article on Tapulous the other day, you know, the guys responsible for the iPhone/iPod Touch game Tap Tap Revenge. Obviously the game has seen crazy adoption rates, but I couldn’t believe just how crazy things have become. The game has been installed more than 20 million times, generating sales of nearly a million dollars per month.

The kicker? Tapulous has just 20 employees. That’s it. The report says the company is profitable, which is as unsurprising as things get. Can you split almost twelve million dollars between 20 people? I know I could. As to the future of the company, the CEO has stayed quiet. There has been speculation that someone like EA could acquire them, but for now that’s not really news. EA has been picking up social gaming developers lately like Playfish, which was bought for a cool $275 million.

Source: Reuters

If the success of Virtual Console titles tells us anything, it’s that gamers love their nerdy past. Classic titles sell like mad, and I know I practically flip when I find out something I loved is coming to a new console. One developer’s been paying attention to the classic game frenzy, and it’s turned a childhood classic into a serious moneymaker.

To find the game, you only have to look at this weeks’ top-grossing iPhone OS games. At the top of the charts, yes all the way at number one, is Where’s Waldo: The Fantastic Journey. This isn’t just a fluke, either. The game beat out Call of Duty: World at War Zombies and Dragon Lair to take the top spot.

Among other games Waldo has pushed out this week are Super Monkey Ball 2, The Sims 3, and Tetris. It’s quite an achievement, really, and something developer Ludia has got to be happy with.

Android may finally be on the handset of your dreams, but it’s too late for mobile game developer Gameloft. The french developer said it has significantly cut its investment in the Android platform due to underwhelming revenues.

“It is not as neatly done as on the iPhone. Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products. On Android nobody is making significant revenue,” said Gameloft’s finance director, Alexandre de Rochefort. There must be a bit of meaning lost in translation of the word “neatly” from french to english because I would hardly call the App Store neat. That’s not to say the decision doesn’t make sense.

According to Rochefort, Gameloft is selling 400 times the number of apps on the App Store as on Android devices. Obviously there are a lot of factors to consider, market share being prime among them. But even if market share were closer I’d imagine Gameloft would struggle with the number of different devices Android runs. With so much different hardware it’s just easier to design apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch and support them.

Source: Washington Post