Q&A: Greg Joswiak, Head of iPhone and iPod Marketing – Part 1

For how many years have people been predicting Apple’s entrance into the games industry? The argument was semi-persuasive: after unprecedented success in the portable music industry and the radical about-turn of its Mac ranges, the Cupertino giant is now seen as one of the coolest companies around – and, as such, why would it not want to get into what many see as one of the coolest industries around? 

Of course, the easy answer is that it has – and the disastrous Pippin is proof of why a company shouldn’t stretch itself too far, even if that was an Apple of a different era. But times change, and that prediction has come true, albeit in a slightly roundabout, and possibly unintentional manner. Apple has never hidden the fact that the staggering performance of its iPhone and iPod Touch App Store was a huge surprise to the company, but we’d wager that quite how predominantly games featured in that success was perhaps the most shocking thing of all – especially to a company with a quite public disregard of gaming.

And so, while it might never have intended to, Apple has finally entered the games industry – and with recent promotions focusing on the gaming power of the iPod Touch, it’s clear that the company now has dominance of the portable gaming industry clearly within its sights. 

We sat down with Greg Josiwak, Apple’s head of iPhone and iPod marketing, to talk about Apple’s new strategy as a games platform holder, and the opportunities that lie therein for developers.

Casualgaming.biz: How important are games now to Apple? The games situation for the previous iPods was certainly a more measured approach compared to what we see now.

Greg Joswiak: Well, that was very different – it was a much more controlled environment for click-wheel iPods. This is a different thing – we’ve opened up apps, and we’ve had a lot of takers. That we’ve accumulated 1,500 games in such a short order is pretty amazing.

It’s all in our marketing: we talk about this being ‘the funnest iPod ever’ – music, movies and games. In our TV advertisements now, we’re showing the gaming aspects of it because it’s so clear that people want to do that with this product. We’ve got people playing these games and buying the iPod Touch to play these games. I think it’s a tremendous opportunity for us, for our customers, and for developers and publishers.

Casualgaming.biz: Do you see the App Store’s market as being different to the type of people who would deliberately seek out and enter a specialist games retailer?

Joswiak: I don’t have data, but I think that common sense would say that, well, the App Store goes out to every customer – it’s on every iPod Touch. It’s on every iPhone. So you’re hitting the entire space of people with a single tap of a button, all without having to leave their house.

Maybe in the physical world it takes more commitment, because you’ve got to discover these things, you’ve got to go to a game store, you’ve got to pay a significantly bigger amount of money. So maybe that’s limiting your base, I don’t know – common sense would say that having it out there on every device is an advantage.

Casualgaming.biz: You’ve compared the iPod Touch to the DS – you see yourselves as in that space now? Do you see that as a competitor?

Joswiak: Well, it’s not just the screen quality – it’s the graphics capability, the compute power, the App distribution model. I had an analyst tell me in September – and he was so right – that the DS is the past of gaming devices, and that the iPod Touch is the future of gaming devices. It certainly has our competitors scrambling in what they’re going to do in reaction to this. I think it’s a tremendous start that we’re having at entering this gaming market, and there’s no doubt that that’s happening – it just is.

Casualgaming.biz: Does that mean games are going to be a big part of your iPod marketing going forward?

Joswiak: Certainly with the iPod Touch, we’ve talked about it being the future of the iPod – the iPod that can go beyond just music. And I think we’ve been clear with that: this device can play your music, your movies, your games because this product is capable of so much more, and there’s a tremendous synergy we have with the iPod Touch customer and the game developers.

Casualgaming.biz: The PSP has quite a targeted hardcore audience, and the DS has quite a casual userbase. Where would you position the iPod in that sense?

Joswiak: It represents a more future-looking view of gaming, so maybe it’s in a category of its own. There’s nothing else that does what it does. It’s a very interesting new entrant, and I think that maybe that’s a better question for our competitors.

Check back tomorrow for the second and final part of our interview with Joswiak, when he’ll be talking about the iPhone SDK, App Store, self-publishing and Super Monkey Ball.

For more information visit www.apple.com.