I have played computer games since I was about 6 years old, starting with an ancient text-based nethack clone called LARN.
I played (many) dozens of games on the C64 that was my next computer. The first game I bought was Civilization, for the PC. I have bought (a large proportion, at least) and played (many) dozens of games for the PC, everything from UFO: Enemy Unknown, to Populous 2, Black&White, Warcraft (1, 2, 3, WoW), Diablo (1, 2, 2X), Wolfenstein 3D, Doom 1/2/3, Dune 2 (and Dune 2k), C&C, Red Alert, Dawn of War, Total War, Total Annihilation, King's Quest, Space Quest, Flashback, Prince of Persia, Duke Nukem, Quake 1/2/3, Loom, the TSR/SSI rpg's (played through the whole Krynn series and the Savage Frontier series), Planescape Torment, Baldur's Gate, The Elder Scrolls Arena/Daggerfall, etc. I played them online and offline. I played MUDs till my social life withered to a pale, ghoulish shred of nothingness. I have never been much into consoles, but some of my friends have been, so I've played games (to completion) on the PS2, PS3, the original Xbox, the Xbox 360, and the Wii. I bought games on the XBox Live Arcade, and on PSN, and at the time (before the iPhone) I thought this was an awesome way to deliver games at the right price point, and it was the future of gaming.
I think I qualify as one of those "real gamers" - at least I did in the past.
Despite this long and varied history of playing games on many platforms, today, I own about 3 games on my mac (HL and clones, Trine, and Braid). I own about 40 on my iPhone and iPad.
Arguing who has the most influence is retarded. The unarguable fact is that the iOS platform is indeed having a huge effect on the games that I, a "gamer", play.
I look forward to the final annihilation of the console and PC gaming worlds when the Apple TV comes out.
I find your conclusion disturbing, to say the least. In what parallel universe is it a good thing to have one corporation control an entire market?
ESPECIALLY if the name of that corporation is Apple - doing its best to destroy customer and developer freedom while baiting everyone with aqua-glazed convenience.
It's all a tradeoff. I'm ok with giving up the freedom to install any random software off the web on my phone, if in exchange I get access to hundreds of thousands of apps that just work, are cheap, and do pretty much everything under the sun without screwing up my phone.
Not having to worry about being a sysadmin for my phone gives me more freedom to do the things I actually want to do. As the Linux world and its permanent state of "it'll be ok next year" have demonstrated, you can't have it all. Freedom to mess with the innards of your system, or freedom to forget you're using a "system" and just do stuff with it. Pick one.
I find your comment a little naive, with respect to the 'cheap' part.
I doubt the apps will be as cheap in a situation where there's a single company monopoly.
At the moment, it is in Apple's interest to keep apps cheap, to drive sales of hardware, and adoption of their platform.
If they ever got a stranglehold on the market, however, it would be logical to increase the price of the Apps, up to the price people were willing to pay.
This is exactly what happened with Nintendo in the late 80s and early 90s. Nintendo took a cut of the sale of every cartridge - think it was around 30%
Video games became very expensive.
iOS is not Windows. It is much closer to the controlled channel that NES was.
Apple very much have the ability to narrow access to the walled garden, and increase prices, if they achieve such a monopoly that it becomes advantageous to do so.
Apple already take 30% of the apps' revenues, and they're not expensive.
Are they going to increase their cut? Doubt it. Why would they? Apps are not what makes them money: devices are - and they make a lot more money from having a healthy app ecosystem than they do from squeezing every penny out of developers.
Of course, Apple's ways are mysterious and unpredictable. But they have so far shown no interest in increasing their cut of app revenues. Much like iTunes, they're happy to leverage this huge library of "media" to boost sales of devices.
>Are they going to increase their cut? Doubt it. Why would they?
They could increase their cut. But they could also just increase the price per app, by reducing competition (e.g. only allowing 1 app of each sort). They would be incentivised to do this, to make more profit, obviously.
Seeing as games are being discussed, Nintendo used to do this by increasing the manufacturing cost they charged to make the cartridges (afair, Nintendo had a stranglehold on the cart manufacture), and hence you got situations like where Street Fighter 2 on the SNES was crazily priced - don't remember exactly, but something like £60 in the UK.
>Much like iTunes, they're happy to leverage this huge library of "media" to boost sales of devices.
If they had a device monopoly, they would no longer need the apps to be cheap to boost device sales, which is my point.
You really believe that Apple TV will annihilate console and PC gaming? That's adorable.
Of course arguing who has the most influence in the gaming world is not exactly useful, but arguing that Apple and Steve Jobs had the most is just protype retardyness.
The iPhone, despite (and perhaps because) the fact that it's not a dedicated gaming platform, has wiped the floor with the portable gaming industry. Only fringe people and parents of young children buy a PSP or DS these days. Taking stats from [this article](1), even a successful portable console like the DS has sold only 50m units since 2004. That's 8 years ago. That's 6 million units a year or thereabouts. The iPhone 4S approached that number by the end of launch weekend.
I can't imagine there are any gaming companies serious about portable gaming who don't consider iOS their primary market. Hundreds of millions of customers who actually buy apps. You'd have to be dumb to ignore that.
In the same way, I expect that if the Apple TV does deliver on basically the same sort of disruption that the iPhone delivered to the mobile phone industry, we will see consoles becoming, perhaps not extinct, but at least fringe. Why buy any console, even a Wii, when your Apple TV already supports thousands of cool games?
Of course, this makes a large number of assumptions about the Apple TV. But I don't think they're that far-fetched (though Apple may choose to go in a completely different direction, of course). So, if a disruptive Apple TV comes out, with its sights set on the TV industry as the iPhone had its sights on the mobile phone industry, you can bet your ass that consoles will be a barely noticeable casualty of this battle (in the same way that cheap HD cams, point-and-shoots, and a wide variety of single-purpose devices are being wiped out by the iPhone without even being its target).
Apple gets convergence. Any tech gizmo industry where you have to buy one device for each piece of functionality you want is in deep shit the moment Apple makes a move in their neighbourhood. Consoles are one of those industries.
Why do people bring up the mobile gaming market as evidence of Apple's move into gaming, when mobile gaming has always been a niche. It's a totally different world from living room gaming. So called "hardcore gaming" is not a niche. It is in fact the mainstream. Gaming stores have mid-night releases nearly once a month for a big title. Hardcore games have the same level of fan enthusiasm as an iPhone release. Let's at least acknowledge what they are up against.
Surely Apple is capable of getting into this market, but that product doesn't look like anything they are working with now.
Actually, in reading your post just now, I got an idea for a good startup based in mobile gaming to cut into Apple'e market. That's an excellent statistic, and one I see reflected in electronics stores like BestBuy. I probably wouldn't pursue a startup in mobile gaming myself, but I'm sure someone could, and it'd be quite lucrative if they caught Apple by surprise. The Android market isn't exactly accomplishing that grandiose task right now either - I'd still say there's room for growth. My point here being that instead of waiting for Apple to take over the market (and I could possibly see that with a gaming platform and Apple TV), you could invest in the opportunity presented by the market being displaced before the dust settles and it's much harder.
I played (many) dozens of games on the C64 that was my next computer. The first game I bought was Civilization, for the PC. I have bought (a large proportion, at least) and played (many) dozens of games for the PC, everything from UFO: Enemy Unknown, to Populous 2, Black&White, Warcraft (1, 2, 3, WoW), Diablo (1, 2, 2X), Wolfenstein 3D, Doom 1/2/3, Dune 2 (and Dune 2k), C&C, Red Alert, Dawn of War, Total War, Total Annihilation, King's Quest, Space Quest, Flashback, Prince of Persia, Duke Nukem, Quake 1/2/3, Loom, the TSR/SSI rpg's (played through the whole Krynn series and the Savage Frontier series), Planescape Torment, Baldur's Gate, The Elder Scrolls Arena/Daggerfall, etc. I played them online and offline. I played MUDs till my social life withered to a pale, ghoulish shred of nothingness. I have never been much into consoles, but some of my friends have been, so I've played games (to completion) on the PS2, PS3, the original Xbox, the Xbox 360, and the Wii. I bought games on the XBox Live Arcade, and on PSN, and at the time (before the iPhone) I thought this was an awesome way to deliver games at the right price point, and it was the future of gaming.
I think I qualify as one of those "real gamers" - at least I did in the past.
Despite this long and varied history of playing games on many platforms, today, I own about 3 games on my mac (HL and clones, Trine, and Braid). I own about 40 on my iPhone and iPad.
Arguing who has the most influence is retarded. The unarguable fact is that the iOS platform is indeed having a huge effect on the games that I, a "gamer", play.
I look forward to the final annihilation of the console and PC gaming worlds when the Apple TV comes out.