Dyack: Apps "eroding" handheld quality

The swamp of tacky iOS games is "eroding" the overall quality of the entire handheld market, reckons Silicon Knights president Denis Dyack - the App Store is causing "dramatic disruption".

"My understanding is that there are 17,000 fart apps right now," said Dyack, reported by IndustryGamers. "Those are more fart apps than anyone could possibly ever consume.

"Looking at that number it's frightening," he added. "What it seems to be doing is eroding the handheld market where you're actually getting really high quality games instead of fart apps. And I'm not saying there aren't quality games on the iOS, because there are; there are some good games there, but there's so much performance oversupply and commoditisation that it is actually affecting the industry in a very negative way."

Nintendo president and CEO Satoru Iwata launched into a surprising attack against the volume of App Store produce during his Game Developers Conference 2011 talk. "I do agree," agreed Dyack, "that the industry has to be really careful with that - you're seeing such a dramatic disruption."

Oversupply drives the overall price of iOS games down. In the real world Dyack said most iOS games sell paltry amounts - it's not all Angry Birds and 200 million downloads.

"EEDAR did a talk where they said the gross average for an iOS game - gross, not net - was $700," revealed Dyack. "I can guarantee you that a company like ours and most people cannot survive on a $700 gross."

Silicon Knights is currently working on X-Men Destiny. Sadly, game specifics are still under wraps.

Too Human was the last game Silicon Knights released. This was a futuristic action RPG based around Norse mythology. Eurogamer gave Too Human 6/10.

Whether the Too Human concept of a trilogy will be borne out remains to be seen, although Dyack offered encouraging remarks earlier this month.