GamePro Arcade

Brian Greenstone, head of Pangea Software, has had a rebirth of his company with Apple's invention of the App Store. Pangea Software has adapted its Mac games, which have become hits on the iPhone. With titles like Cro-Mag Rally (which was recently featured in an Apple commercial) and Enigmo reigniting the company, Brian answered a wide array of questions for GamePro.

GamePro: How did your company get started?

Brian Greenstone: I started it in 1986 when I was on Christmas break in college. I was working on a game that was eventually known as Xenocide, and since it was my first really big game I decided to form a company for it.

GP: How has it been to have each of your games as a top seller in the App store?

BG: Pretty awesome! The competition is heating up, so it is getting harder and harder to stay up there, but still, all of our apps are in the Top 50 out of thousands and thousands of apps, so I'm quite pleased.

GP: It seems like more and more applications are lowering prices. Talk about the decision to cut prices and how has it affected sales? Can companies profit even though you keep lowering prices?

BG: I think we were the trendsetter in this because we were the first to dramatically lower our prices. Other publishes saw that when we dropped our prices our apps rocketed up the rankings, so they got the clue and started doing it themselves. Generally speaking, apps sell a lot more at lower prices, and the increase in volume more than makes up for the drop in price. Each game seems to have a sweet spot, so dropping everything to 99 cents isn't necessarily the right thing to do. You sorta have to "fish" for the sweet spot for each game - the perfect balance between sales volume and price per unit.

GP: With so many free games and applications available, does this make it harder to sell?

BG: It wasn't until about 3 weeks ago when the Top 50 list finally started filling up with fairly decent apps. For the first few months it was all crap, so there wasn't any serious competition, but now it's a bit harder. Still, I think our apps are more technically advanced than just about anything else, but sometimes a simple app will sell better than a glitzy 3D killer app... like iBeer.

GP: What are your thoughts on the App Store layout? How could it be improved?

BG: On iTunes is ok, but on the iPhone it's really getting bad. The App Store on the iPhone just wasn't designed for thousands and thousands of apps. This is why it's so important that our apps be in the Top 50. If they aren't, then nobody will ever see them on the iPhone, because it's almost impossible to find anything that isn't in the Top 50. Apple needs to sub-categorize the games, and they probably need to have a "Bargain Apps" category that is for everything under $3.99. Anything over $3.99 should have its own Top 100 list and so on. That way the consumer can separate the crap from the quality.

GP: How does developing for the iPhone/ iPod Touch compare to Mac development? Do you plan on porting more of your classics onto the portable devices?

BG: It's basically the same, just with much tighter resources. Hardly any RAM and a slow CPU, but it's all manageable. We've already submitted Nanosaur 2 to Apple, so that should be up, and next we plan on porting Otto Matic.

GP: Do you envision more examples like Star Wars The Force Unleashed, where a mainstream game is developed for the iPhone? Will we see any AAA games this fall on the App Store?

BG: Oh, I'm sure we'll see many more of these, especially in the next few months. However, those AAA titles are clearly struggling a bit now because they can't really compete with all of the $1 and $2 apps out there. Some of the AAA titles have already fallen off the Top 50 lists. I think the days of the $10 iPhone game are numbered.

GP: Have you thought of offering a demo for any of your titles?

BG: No, there's no point. Demos just give people an excuse not to buy the game. For every 1 person that a demo influences to buy the game, it gives enough of a thrill to 20 other people so that they don't feel that they need to buy the full version. Besides, we already have demo versions of all of those games on the Mac.

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