Earlier today, Apple announced its App Store digital distribution platform reached two billion downloads. That’s 500,000 downloads in just over three months from their July milestone of 1.5 billion downloads. Venture Beat reports that out of the 85,000 apps available for consumers, just fewer than 20% or 16,000 of those are games, making games the single largest category of software available through the App Store. Apple also announced that they have 50 million units on the market split between the iPhone and the iPod Touch that can utilize the App Store.

With Apple’s increasing interest in games and utilizing them in their already dominate role in media digital distribution, it’s not surprising that major game players such as Sony are taking a cue from Apple when preparing their own app stores. It will prove challenging, even for dominate gaming publishers  to offer a viable platform to compete with the App Store. Apple already offers an enormous consumer base, integrated media devices and low overhead for developers (especially indy developers); all of which will prove hard to chip away at. As other smart phone publishers ramp up their software offerings and Sony prepares to launch their PSP GO, which will be designed around a digital distribution platform, there will at least be healthy competition to keep Apple on their feet but for now, their spot at the top looks very secure.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/09/28appstore.html