Hot from Apple’s It’s only Rock and Roll Event, GDGT.com has live-blogged the entire event, and when it came to the success of the iPhone/iTouch as a gaming platform they had a few fighting words when comparing Apple’s service to the PSP and DS offerings.

On the subject of how many games are available and the buying experience via Phil Schiller:

“Games are expensive — $25-35 per title. Worse isn’t the price, it’s the buying experience, going to a store is just not a lot of fun. Built into every iPod touch is the App Store… you’ll see a big difference.” Chart time. PSP: 607 titles. DS: 3680. iPhone OS: 21,178 titles.

Okay, the buying experience isn’t exactly perfect, but that’s no reason to stop buying games that come on physical media. Having a store on your device is great and will eventually be the standard for all devices but again, that’s not going to put the brick and mortar stores or the physical media out of existence.

Phil again, on the iPod Touch in general:

“It’s a great portable game player as well. … when the PSP and DS came out, they seemed so cool. But once you play on the iPod touch, they don’t stack up anymore!”

I don’t know, they’re both still cool to me. I know most of what he’s saying is just standard press conference chest beating that every company does when they’re on stage, but while I’ve seen the Apple App store become successful, at the same time I haven’t seen the PSP and DS suffer as a result. I know there have been people who only play portable games exclusively on their iPod Touches and iPhones but I haven’t seen the other platforms drop in notoriety. Both are still coming out with games all year round and have both been successes in their own right. It’s been pretty balanced in terms of success for all the portable platforms this gen, each with their ups and downs and revivals again.

And regarding what Phil said about the tribulations and horrors of shopping for games at stores;about the stores, fuck it I’m just going to go ahead and say it I like shopping for used games (both portable and console) at places like Gamestop. It’s fun. It’s cheap and it’s fun. I like digging through the used games, seeing the crap and the gems that span almost an entire decade now. Stores might get smaller, hobbyist shops might get put on the chopping block, but just like how music and books have managed to survive for the last decade or so as physical media, so will video games as long as there’s a market that still wants to buy their products that way. – The Ben