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[roboprez]

As some people may know adobe recently made this announcement. http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/
In short in Flash CS5 you can export the whole project as the native iPhone file to put on the app store. Remember you still need a developer account with Apple and go through all their hullabaloo.

Now as a intermediate Actionscript programmer I immediately thought "This  is perfect for me!" Then I remembered, this is probably perfect for millions and millions of other people as well. I've been planing to learn Objective-C, play around with the iPhone SDK and eventually buy a license to make a game for the AppStore and make some money. Reading some articles this seamed an entirely possible way to make some money.

Now with this new way of iPhone development I'm wondering is any effort I make to iPhone development going to be out shined by all existing Flash developers? Is it going to be worth focusing my development on the iPhone or will I just waste my money?

[Craig Stern]

I heard about this as well. If the iPhone weren't such a horrible market to go into (particularly for the kind of games I like to make), I'd be very excited about this.

[Gorgoo]

Actually, I could see this working for Flash developers, even with the large amount of new apps it'll probably cause. As long as it isn't too difficult to port a flash game to an iPhone app, a developer could have both an online and iPhone (or "portable" or whatever) version without the extra effort necessary to reprogram the thing in Objective-C. Aside from going through Apple's approval process, that seems to be potential extra profit without too much extra work.

On the other hand, it seems like it might hurt groups that create games specifically for the iPhone, if only because of the fact that a lot more apps'll be coming in now that Flash developers don't need to learn an extra language.

[travisdunn]

If your business model relies on being the first mover in a gold rush, and you're worried that some other bearded fellows with picks and pans will reach the river before you, well you'll probably die poor and confused at the bottom of a ravine.

The iPhone is a crowded market (just like any lucrative market), and a rush by Flash developers will not overwhelm App Store games market, assuming the developers even start porting their products in large numbers to begin with. Visibility in the App Store has been a recurring problem since its inception, and a few hundred+ Flash developers more or less will not impact the fundamental issues there.

Basically, your game will prove lucrative if you position and promote it correctly, and it will fail of you don't.

There are not very many full time iPhone games developers and shops, and those that do exist have usually come over from another platform with existing brands and fans. That said, I can't imagine that the work it would take to bring over existing Flash games wouldn't be a net success, especially if you already have some popularity you can leverage toward promoting the port's release.