Have you ever wondered how many iOS games are currently available in the AppStore? If so, well today you find out that you now have at your disposal approximately 42.000 games for iOS, both for iPad and for iPhone. Of course, among these there are many lite versions of paid games, but in essence the AppStore hosts approximately 42.000 games at the moment. Considering these figures, the site TUAW it was decided to make a small comparison between the number of games added to the AppStore in the last 2 years and the number of games developed for consoles in the last 25 years. As you can see from the graph, the AppStore has almost 3 times more games (42.007 vs 17.150) than 3 generations of consoles combined and we have all the important consoles from the last 25 years listed there.
To be honest, the iOS platform has had a spectacular growth in recent years, but let's not forget that many of the games for consoles are very complex and their development takes years compared to the time required to develop a game for iOS. Making a comparison with the flash games available on the web, it was noticed that at the moment there are approximately 40.000 flash games on the web, so still fewer than those in the AppStore.
A fairer comparison is perhaps with Flash games, where there is no publisher control at all and many of the "games" are barely more than tiny diversions similar to those the App Store contains in such multitudes. I am greatful to comment Gareth Halfacree who contacted Newgrounds, probably the largest collection of Flash games in the world, to ask how many games they currently have. They replied that it was "about 40,000" and that this dates back to 1995. Newgrounds probably hosts some substantial amount of all the world's Flash game content, certainly of all that was written since the site became the pre-eminent source for Flash games. The fact that it still only contains a number of games approximately equivalent to iOS's total after a few years demonstrates, I believe, the only thing I was trying to say in the first place: that the App Store has seen an unprecedented growth rate in games published.
