OPEN

Audi in the US has been one of the first car companies to get a game out on iPhone’s App Store.

I downloaded it the other day and played it – a bit. Here’s some thoughts:

Good place for targeting innovators / early adopters: With the iPhone store so phenomenally successful (almost 2,000 apps up now, £15mm revenue in the first month) it’s a smart place to be.

Form over content: Hats off to Audi and their agency for getting in there quick with a game on this new platform. The content’s not up to much though – it’s a basic driving round a circuit format: not very easy, but not very rewarding. The birds-eye view of the car says nothing about the car – not even about its looks. Reviews on iPhone gaming sites are – at first glance – poor.

Being there brought buzz – not so sure about next time: Taking a look in Google you can see that a lot of news sites and blogs wrote about the game. There was a definite novelty factor in a brand using this platform, although where the game was played, as I noted above were poor. With so many apps flooding onto the platform though, I’m not sure you would get a lot of attention for a similar game in a month or so.

Links to a site that’s not (well) iPhone optimised: Actually the A4 iPhone microsite *is* optimised for iPhone, or at least desgned for it, although when I first visited it I wasn’t so sure. It also crashed my iPhone when I tried some of the features – although in fairness to the designers, alot of things crash my iPhone. *ahem*.

Overall, I would say fair play to Audi for giving this a spin, as it were. Like the iPint from Carling they’ve been first in the brand rush into the iPhone space. Developing apps for the iPhone’s going to be a smart move for brands, but if you’ve got a game in development best to make sure it will compete with the better games in the paid-for top 25-50 apps out there.

The attention market in the app store is fierce and being there won’t be a guarantee of success…