Here’s a headline and a half: Apple has been voted the biggest influence on the video games industry.
The report from which the conclusions were drawn surveyed one thousand people working in the industry, with Apple founder Steve Jobs voted most influential person (with 26% of the vote overall) and the iPhone taking 17% of the product category.
The top five people and products from the survey, which was carried out by the London Games Conference, are below:
Top five people to have shaped video games
- Steve Jobs 26% / 46%
- Gabe Newell (co-founder and managing director of Valve) 16% / 29%
- Shigeru Miyamoto (developer of Mario, Donkey Kong, Zelda) 7% / 12%
- Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the world wide web) 4% / 8%
- Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) 3% / 5%
Top five products to have shaped video games
- Apple’s iPhone 17% / 53%
- Nintendo Wii console 7% / 22%
- Xbox Live 3% / 9%
- The original PlayStation console 3% / 9%
- Steam (digital distribution) 2% / 7%
(First figures are percentage of overall vote; second are percentage of top five votes)
“In just over three years the iPhone and the App Store have transformed what consumers expect of games, and how the industry makes and sells them – today, download games have come to the fore,” said Michael French, editor in chief, MCV.
“Forget PlayStation, the Internet or Mario,” says the press release, “it seems Apple has had the biggest impact on the world of video games.”
Discuss.
Tuffcub
Utterly, uetterly pointless survey. The Iphone & Facebook developers at the conference will outweight AAA console developers 10 to 1 so the survey demographic is weighted heavily in their favour.
Stupid survey is stupid.
bunimomike
Yep. It’s flawed from the off but important in itself to see how people perceive things (whether they’re right or wrong). Apple has almost no impact on gaming, when you look at the industry as a whole (and take decades of gaming into account). However, we look forward and see iDevices shaping casual gaming more and more as casual gamers are here to stay.
Sure, they’re not swarming around TSA like we all do but, wow, do they have the money to spend (as we’ve seen with the Wii).
plutoniumdragon
As an Apple hater I wish I could disagree, but I think the facts speak for themselves, for portable gaming at least.
For casual/social gaming at home it would be had to argue against the sheer numbers playing Facebook’s flash style mini games.
Does the “blockbuster” type game even have a long term future?
skibadee
they sell millions on release day I think they have a huge future.
plutoniumdragon
Hope you are right, I like AAA games.
It’s a hell of an investment against expectation of returns though. Who has those resources these days, especially when a very much smaller team can produce a casual/social/mobile game with a fraction of the investment and make potentially greater profits?
skibadee
my 10 year old niece said it best the other day when she was on my ipad, I said whats better this or PS3 she said PS3 the games are much better.
TSBonyman
Besides advancing mobile phone games from a ‘complete crap’ to a ‘barely tolerable’ status, i can’t see what else they’ve brought to gaming. I haven’t seen any evidence of gaming getting up off it’s backside on apple platforms for years, except for the addition of steam recently and that’s got more to do with steam surely.
Scotty34
COBBLERS!!! whilst they all will have an impact in there own way, they shouldn’t be compared by percentages imo.
Kennykazey
What? How? An impact, yes. Biggest influence, don’t think so.
JBoo
lol i like the way you put just “Forget PlayStation.” & missed out the rest. Zzzzzzzzz how predictable this site is :-/
nofi
““Forget PlayStation, the Internet or Mario,” says the press release, “it seems Apple has had the biggest impact on the world of video games.””
Last line.
a inferior race
You should at least try to read the whole article before falling asleep.
KeRaSh
Biggest influence: I’d say it’s a bad influence because while casual touch screen games can be fun, I don’t want them to replace real games because they make more money with less work.
Apple changed the game when it comes down to what we can expect from games: Yes, because casual touch screen games are the way to go, people who expect real games have to lower their expectations. :P
Don’t get me wrong. I see what Apple achieved in the gaming market but not everything about it is all sunshine and unicorns. While Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Fruit Ninja and the likes are great games, I don’t want them to replace my Final Fantasy or Uncharted games.
colmshan1990
The PS2 is the most influential console.
The DVD drive made it acceptable to take it out of the bedroom/ playroom and into the living room.
Consoles weren’t for kids anymore- they were entertainment devices.
Or I could argue the PS1 paved the way for it, being a disc drive.
Of course, THAT was only supposed to be a part of a certain famous Nintendo console.
Nintendo are the biggest influence- Gameboy. N64. SNES. Wii. DS.
Those are the biggest in my mind.
As for Apple being the biggest influence? Nokia and Nintendo were the innovators, Apple only took it a step further.
And Nintendo and Sony had already embraced the casual market at this stage.
AG2297
What short memories people have. I really don’t know what Jobs is doing there (well I do, popularity) surely Bill Gates should be there for investing so much into Xbox and Xbox Live … not Jobs who happened to create the iPhone but actually didn’t like gaming at all. There has got to be more than one person who works at Apple you know.
Terrible survey.
InternationalGamer
Probably because most casual gamers on phones voted with Apple since they don’t play games on the playstation or what ever that was made for gaming but just play apps and on the Iphone or Android phone.
Atari or Nintendo are most likely the biggest influences on video games in my opinion
cnutard
“The report from which the conclusions were drawn surveyed one thousand people working in the industry” so probably not. Though as mentioned earlier there could have been more Apple employees asked that developers of games etc.