Apple Voted Largest Influence On Gaming Industry

[IronicBeet]

Totally didn't vote for him just because he died, definitely not.

Oh, and Mark Zuckerberg? Really? These people don't know shit about video games.

 

[IronicBeet]

I believe it.

In the year 2011 I have only bought 7 video games, and there are 3 coming out that I want.

I've bought more than 7 games on my iPod in the past month, and downloaded well over 10 for free.

People can try to cover their ears and yell "la la la la la" on the matter all they want, but the app store and iDevices have taken a huge step forward in the gaming community. And a lot of the easy to pick up and play casual games have attracted a wider audience to the hobby (yes, gaming is a hobby, not a lifestyle)

If any company has taken any monumental steps forward in gaming recently, it's been Apple.

EDIT: and since I'm sure someone is going to accuse me of it. No, I'm not a mac fanboy. I'm typing this on a PC, I don't own an iPhone, and I think the iPad is stupid. I own an iPod Touch for gaming, and that's it.

Oh, they've certainly influenced gaming. Definitely not for the better, though.

 

[Danzavare]

I can't fathom it, I just can't. I owned a pocket PC YEARS before any iPhone was invented. It had touch screen, a stylus, easily customisable themes, mp3 players, video, games (retro, touchscreen based, casual, rts, a variety really) and a bunch of things. At the time it retailed around the price the iPhone sells for now, and this was years prior to the iPhone's release.

I still struggle to comprehend how Apple managed sell a product that has existed for years as new and charge a hell of a lot for it and have so many people buy it! It was the same thing with the iPods! Why do people make these massive purchases without looking for a shred of information!?

It's evil. ;_; I suppose it's influential in the sense that it has made a really strong propaganda campaign. (I won't make the comparison, but I'm thinking it. D: )

Stupid marketing departments.

Edit: I think the general defensiveness a lot of gamers (Extra credits be damned, it's a handy word for the purpose of discussion.) when it comes to Apple is less that they're anti casual gaming and more that they (me included) feel like the casual gaming trend is artificially being used to try and redefine gaming in general and I don't think that's quite accurate. It is surely a new (well, old really, but for the sake of argument let's pretend it's new) type of gaming but it's something that happens alongside other types of gaming more than it directly reshapes the more conventional games we play. (Halo, Final Fantasy, SoulCaliber, y'know, the usual)

 

[subtlefuge]

Steve Jobs, the hero.

For finding a more roundabout way to put flash games in our hands than just allowing flash on the phone.

 

[Hitchmeister]

I hate to break it to the console jockeys, but anyone trying to innovate by developing games for current-gen consoles is just asking to go bankrupt. A Facebook game (Zuckerberg) or an iOS app (Jobs) is where you'll find the future of gaming.

The rather large glaring problem with your statement is that you are running a fairly huge assumption that there will only be one type of gaming in the future.

This may break a few hearts but the reality is there isn't a single platform that can do every type of game perfectly. Given that different platforms do different games better than others I see a gaming future where you are still playing games on more than just one type of platform.

Facebook games can be fun but you just can't pull off a top notch first person shooter or an MMO as massive as World of Warcraft. I just don't see a gaming future where the only type of game people want to play is a casual game on something like a phone.

Given some of the huge numbers consoles can still pull in for a big release it's far too early to be calling the death of gaming consoles. Still plenty of room in the gaming universe to pop on the X-Box 360 for a death match in the latest shooter, mine some resources on your Facebook games, and then kill a little time playing Angry Birds on the Kindle Fire.

Saying casual gaming will be the only gaming in the future because it's popular is bit like saying vampires will be the only type of undead in various forms of media because vampires have some popular movies and TV shows.

It's about innovation. Sure the console is the natural home of AAA FPS titles, and traditional PC gaming for MMOs. But there's very little new under the sun in those. Low financial risk Facebook games and iOS apps (and Indy Steam titles, though they weren't being dismissed by the original article) are where developers are willing to try something new and risky in gameplay. The things that work, will be incorporated into major titles. But without those outlets, all gaming will just coalesce in to a grey mass of "more of the same."

Just because those platforms are not the home of multi-million dollar, 10/10 bought and paid for Metacritic score, tent-pole titles, does not mean they aren't influential.

 

[Ashley Blalock]

Edit: I think the general defensiveness a lot of gamers (Extra credits be damned, it's a handy word for the purpose of discussion.) when it comes to Apple is less that they're anti casual gaming and more that they (me included) feel like the casual gaming trend is artificially being used to try and redefine gaming in general and I don't think that's quite accurate. It is surely a new (well, old really, but for the sake of argument let's pretend it's new) type of gaming but it's something that happens alongside other types of gaming more than it directly reshapes the more conventional games we play. (Halo, Final Fantasy, SoulCaliber, y'know, the usual)

I think part of this death of gaming as we know it thing comes from people just love to prematurely tout the death of things. When TV came along people swore it was the end of radio, all the radio stations would close down and there would only be TV, yet radio adapted. The internet and books on something other than paper was the death of print, and yet you can still buy a good old fashion printed book these days.

Angry Birds or Plants vs Zombies might sell a lot of downloads but it hardly seems like we can predict the future of gaming off the success of some titles on new platforms.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

It's about innovation. Sure the console is the natural home of AAA FPS titles, and traditional PC gaming for MMOs. But there's very little new under the sun in those. Low financial risk Facebook games and iOS apps (and Indy Steam titles, though they weren't being dismissed by the original article) are where developers are willing to try something new and risky in gameplay. The things that work, will be incorporated into major titles. But without those outlets, all gaming will just coalesce in to a grey mass of "more of the same."

Just because those platforms are not the home of multi-million dollar, 10/10 bought and paid for Metacritic score, tent-pole titles, does not mean they aren't influential.

The games that are played on the Iphone add absolutely nothing new to gameplay that hasn't already been tried a thousand times in online flash based games. Look at Kongregate.com, Armorgames.com, Miniclip.com etc. etc. All really popular sites, with really well known flash based casual games, and the really successful Iphone games are generally just reskinned versions of their most popular titles. (Angry Birds=Crush the Castle)

Also I fail to see how any of the gameplay "Innovations" created by Plants Vs. Zombies could ever be useful to the developers of Dead Island, or Left 4 Dead, or what gems of gameplay Farmville has to give to the RTS genre. Iphone games and AAA titles are pretty much completely seperate titles, and innovation in Iphone titles has as much benefit to the AAA titles as innovation in trashcan designs.

The Iphone has been responsible for putting casual games into the hands of a brand new audience, and a new lucrative market has been created because of this, but it is quite seperate from the AAA titles that the major PC/Console developers make.

 

[Dendio]

The wii led to both sony and microsoft creating similar motion control for their respective machines.
No one was thinking motion control before the wii. One can argue the iphone app buisness originated with the Ngage or the DSiware tech

Every year the world gets a little more cynical for me. So im going to say that jobs go the vote due to his recent death.

 

[Callate]

Zuckerberg has about as much place on the list as Jobs; Facebook (and through it, "social gaming") has had approximately as much of an effect on the industry and the medium as the iPhone line.

Of course, it's bullshit.

Not to pick on Jobs, or anything. (Fill in the standard boilerplate about how innovative Apple's products have proven over the last decade or so here, please- I'm tired of rehashing.) It wouldn't surprise me to find that smartphones and tablets represented the new face of video games in the decade to come. It would depress the hell out of me, but it wouldn't surprise me.

But Apple, while facilitating games, putting games of a certain sort in many people's hands, helping to make those kinds of games cheap and accessible- they are not a games company. They don't make games on any real scale. Many of the innovations of games on the iPhone and the iPad are as much about overcoming the inbuilt flaws and shortcomings of the hardware as they are about making use of its abilities. Apple is happy to be part of games in as much as Apple would like to control everything, but if you go looking for a suggestion that Apple has any great love for or inherent understanding of the medium, I don't think you'll find it.

Conversely, if it weren't for people like Shigeru Miyamoto, games probably wouldn't be the popular medium they are today. Companies like Infocom and men like Hideo Kojima (say what you will) showed that games could aspire to have stories and characters as memorable as any other medium. Apogee and id created the shareware model and brought revolutionary new software into computer users' homes before the Internet was something everyone had heard of. Apple walks in the steps of giants, and it pisses me off a little that they should get this much credit because of Jobs' passing (I'm sorry, it's true!) and the audience's short attention span.

Wait two years, and I think you'd get a very different survey result.

 

[omega 616]

My Bullshit senses are tingling...

Steve Jobs? Really?

Methinks his recent death has skewed the results somewhat.

Nah, I think it's half apple is the latest douchebag brand, so everybody knows who jobbs is and the other half is the billion casual apps games ... a thread title on this site is "Angry Birds Downloaded Half a Billion Times" I don't even think COD has that many players.

So I can kind of see how they got these results but come on, macs have almost no games on them (steam makes me say that) and nintendo have been making games before there was a planet ....

 

[AdumbroDeus]

You people might not realize this.

But the mainstream of gaming has shifted drastically by this. This site caters to hardcore gamers, but we're undergoing an incredibly drastic change in gaming's place in society and how gaming is done.

Nintendo certainly was influential in saving the industry, the long-term impact of the radical change that the iphone created changed the core way games will be played in the future. As loath as I am to say it, I doubt that the smartphone revolution will leave a place for consoles in the true sense any more.


App stores, cloud-based computing for larger scale games, all the pieces are in place for consoles and PCs to be completely replaced by multi-purpose devices of which the iphone represents.


Granted, it was not the first, but it popularized smartphones and the app store changed the way games are viewed in society and what are being developed for moble devices.


This is the wave of the future, we resist it because these devices are seen as casual, but at this point carving out a niche in that demographic is the most important thing we can do.

 

[brainslurper]

Can you smell bullshit?
'cause I sure do!

Steve Jobs was nothing more than a modern age "snake oil" salesman.

The high-tech huckster promised nearly everything and gave next to nothing.

Have you checked out the new iPhone... 10% better than the last version and STILL can't run flash!

Oh my fuck. You people have been dismissing the iPhone for years simply because it doesn't run flash, and Apple has explained constantly why they don't want flash on iOS, because it is a resource hogging battery waster, that was never intended for touch devices and is outclassed in nearly every way by HTML5. Also, the new iPhone is 200% faster then the iPhone 4 in CPU strength, and 700% faster in graphics performance, putting it on par with the PlayStation Vita.

And by THIS time next year, you'll be able to buy that same phone on eBay for $10.

Wake up and smell the coffee; Jobs was just a cyberage charlton.

All he was missing was a campaign hat, a stripped vest and a bamboo cane.

Great facts bro. The last generation iPhone is selling for upwards of $500 bucks on ebay. The iPhone 3Gs from 2 years ago is selling for 350 bucks, and the iPhone 3g is selling for 300. Even the first generation iPhone, from 5 years ago, is selling at around $100. And you complain that Steve Jobs is lying? Perhaps all the YOU are missing is a campaign hat, a stripped vest and a bamboo cane.

 

[theonecookie]

How this man can get praise is beyond me. He seems to be credited with everybody else's work because he can sell products at an inflated price to idiots lets just have a a Quick look at his supposed innovations

Pc's: not even close the first electronic computer was build by a british post office worker
Smartphones: we called them pocket pc's before thay where cool
Tablet pc's: close but no cigar apples first tablet was 1987 where as the first tablet was made in the 1980
portable music player:nope

So much innovation it could make a small child cry the only thing Jobs could be credited with is starting a hipster cult full of morons who will buy his stuff at an inflated price point for no other reason than Its apple herp derp

And now hes dead there trying to give him the games industry to because you can play flash games on your fucking overpriced phone the interesting thing about this is angry birds is about as original as he was being a pallet swapped flash game of about as much merit and don't try to pretend its some how a breeding ground for new idea's you only need to go to any online free games web site to see how 99.9% of all of them where done years ago which interestingly enough now I think about it is probably the reason the iphone doesn't support flash because its hard to sell crap when better crap is available for free

*Sigh* wake me up when the world dose

 

[Danzavare]

Edit: I think the general defensiveness a lot of gamers (Extra credits be damned, it's a handy word for the purpose of discussion.) when it comes to Apple is less that they're anti casual gaming and more that they (me included) feel like the casual gaming trend is artificially being used to try and redefine gaming in general and I don't think that's quite accurate. It is surely a new (well, old really, but for the sake of argument let's pretend it's new) type of gaming but it's something that happens alongside other types of gaming more than it directly reshapes the more conventional games we play. (Halo, Final Fantasy, SoulCaliber, y'know, the usual)

I think part of this death of gaming as we know it thing comes from people just love to prematurely tout the death of things. When TV came along people swore it was the end of radio, all the radio stations would close down and there would only be TV, yet radio adapted. The internet and books on something other than paper was the death of print, and yet you can still buy a good old fashion printed book these days.

Angry Birds or Plants vs Zombies might sell a lot of downloads but it hardly seems like we can predict the future of gaming off the success of some titles on new platforms.

That makes sense. I suppose it's a lot easier to sell a story about 'revolution' than a story about a vaguely similar alternative. I kind of wish more of the Escapist articles would frame it in a more appropriate way though.

 

[Ashley Blalock]

You people might not realize this.

But the mainstream of gaming has shifted drastically by this. This site caters to hardcore gamers, but we're undergoing an incredibly drastic change in gaming's place in society and how gaming is done.

Nintendo certainly was influential in saving the industry, the long-term impact of the radical change that the iphone created changed the core way games will be played in the future. As loath as I am to say it, I doubt that the smartphone revolution will leave a place for consoles in the true sense any more.


App stores, cloud-based computing for larger scale games, all the pieces are in place for consoles and PCs to be completely replaced by multi-purpose devices of which the iphone represents.


Granted, it was not the first, but it popularized smartphones and the app store changed the way games are viewed in society and what are being developed for moble devices.


This is the wave of the future, we resist it because these devices are seen as casual, but at this point carving out a niche in that demographic is the most important thing we can do.

I'm going to have to disagree because you are running with the logic that new will always completely replace the old.

When Monopoly was invented and became popular it didn't mean that people stopped playing chess and checkers because they were the "old" way to play a game on a board with some sort of tokens you move around.

The invention of cable networks did not mean the end of broadcast television.

Just because phone based games and Facebook games are doing well that doesn't mean they are going to kill off Nintendo, Playstation, X-Box and PC gaming. Sure I could play Plants vs Zombies on a smart phone but since I don't have a smart phone I just purchased it to play on my X-Box from the X-Box live game store. Not just phones that let you down load games. Or I can play Angry Birds on my PC.

Things like the i-Phone is expanding the number of people who play games but just because they are expanding the number of gamers that doesn't mean that gamers are going to give up their consoles to only play games on a smart phone.

Smart phones can't play World of Warcraft or Modern Warfare so I can't see the people who buy the big games going to just casual gaming even though casual gaming is a hot market right now. Plenty of market left for the people looking for a bit more out of their game or wanting to play on their big TV at home.

 

[The-Epicly-Named-Man]

My f*cking arse. I'm guessing this is only because Jobs died recently but the PlayStation and Shigeru Miyamoto are the obvious winners of those titles. One opened up gaming to the masses, the other opened up gaming to the retards.

 

[Charli]

...What.

What was the demographic for this survey...everyone who owns an iphone gets to take it? Get out.

 

[Wintermoot]

I think they kindly left out the Pipin
also I,m sure that without Nintendo the gaming industry would still be in the gutter and people should stop praising jobs for stuff he didn't really do.

 

[Adam28]

I hate to break it to the console jockeys, but anyone trying to innovate by developing games for current-gen consoles is just asking to go bankrupt. A Facebook game (Zuckerberg) or an iOS app (Jobs) is where you'll find the future of gaming.

But by using this logic Sir Tim Berners-Lee probably should of won it though, as he takes credit for the world wide web. Hell, even Bill Gates should be more entitled to this achievement seeing as most people will be running Facebook in their browsers on a Windows PC.