Steve Jobs and Apple's Influence on Gaming Massively Overstated
forbes.com
forbes.com
The survey results were indeed silly, but you have to forgive people a bit for being enthralled by the rapidity with which Apple has changed the game (pun intended). It's not just mobile vs console/PC -- Apple (and, to be fair, Zynga, though I personally despise their work) have also ushered in a new era of casual gaming that really appeals to the mass audience. And, let's not forget, to little kids.
With Crash we tried to channel Miyamoto's emphasis on simple game mechanics and fun for all ages. Nobody did more than Miyamoto to make games (industry-wide) fun. (As an aside, though, there are many largely unknown industry figures who have worked very hard in the same way, and have accomplished similar results; Mark Cerny, whom we worked with at Naughty Dog, and who designed or co-designed the gameplay for the Sonic, Crash, Jak & Daxter, and Ratchtet & Clank series certainly deserves a lot of credit as well.)
As a now-industry-outsider, it seems to me that Apple's resurgence has had the following effects on games:
1) casual gaming is again dominant; 2) it's no longer clear we need dedicated consoles in our living rooms; 3) one or two people can make a viable, salable game again
Naughty Dog has seen their budgets increase from around $1M for Crash 1 to many tens of millions of dollars these days. There will still be a big market for AAA titles with huge budgets. But what interests me most is that two coders in Laos (say) can now make a game that lots of people will buy. Sort of like in the Apple II era, when one or two people could create salable games (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasir_Gebelli for a great example); this is a welcome change for aspiring game developers.
And I confess I'm happy about the return to casual gaming and greater emphasis on pure gameplay.
But if I were Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft, I would be very concerned about #2.
What did surprise me was the arguments against the author, specially those who said that Steve Jobs was more known that other options in the list. Under that -and many of the other- premises the top spot would definitively belong to Bill Gates, since for a long time the best games ran almost exclusively in PC, or because BASIC -that had the snake game or the one with the gorillas throwing bananas- came with MS-DOS and was the first development environment offered free for anyone who bought a PC, with no $100 annual fee and no big-brother curation.
Also I can argue against the notion that the future of gaming is mobile, I've been in the (mobile) industry for many years and I came to the conclusion that mobile gaming will always be a niche for a casual gamers, but heavy gaming, the one that pushes the technology to its limit, will be for a long time the realm of the consoles and PC's. The future of gaming is virtual reality, EEG controlling and motion sensors, not virtual potatoes spamming people's email.
And this illustrates very much the reality of Mr. Jobs, his products were in many cases very innovative from the consumer electronics point of view, but not necessarily from the technological point-of-view, even the iPod, by far his most breakthrough product, was developed from parts he bought off-the-shelf somewhere.
Saying that mobile is the future of gaming is like saying that the iPad is the future of computing.
"In the 1980's (and into the mid 1990's) the Apple II computer series was one of the premier game systems in the computer industry. Despite it's graphical and sound shortcomings (especially with the 8 bit series machines), programmers always found ways to make the best games possible for the II series. In it's heyday, Apple II supporters claimed the Apple II had some 10,000 programs for it and many of those were games."
I therefore nominate Mark Angela, the CEO of Pizza Express, as the gaming giant of the century.
In conclusion, Apple II's popularity is an interest factoid, but not relevant to the article. It is barely a blip on the radar of gaming history.
And why was the company ignored by major titles later? Well, the company was a mess, and I could argue that Apple was virtually ignored by everyone except graphic designers and musicians after Jobs left...
Still buried in the Windows gamer mentality about Macs being slow. Random gamers chosen from the street would be more qualified to write a Forbes column than this punk.
To actually consider the point at hand (influence of iOS on the game industry), it's fair to note that this battle is far from concluded. The advance of video games targeting new demographics, as led by the Wii, smartphone and social network games, and how they will play out versus sales of tried-and-true genres on PCs and consoles, is far from over. One could be forgiven an ambiguous stance on the matter.
Personally speaking, as a recently retired gamer (that is, I plumb don't have the time these days), my hat is in the ring with Gabe Newell. Game distribution following a publishing model is flawed, and while the industry is just barely waking up to this, Valve seems to be in the best position to adapt as time goes by.
The reason that games are a success on iOS is due to the fact that the graphics support was already there for other purposes. If an extra chip was required in order to enable that level of gaming Jobs would almost certainly have killed it.
The wave of mobile games allows people who don't play games to start - and the fact that you can play off a mobile device means all they have to do is buy a $1 game off the App Store instead of spending $250 on a PSP/DS. It also allows gamers to take their games on the go without bringing along ANOTHER device. So in this way Apple probably did influence gaming more than any other company.
That said, it was NOT Apple that got the industry to where it was before the iPhone came out. It was NOT Apple that developed video games from their infancy to the art/science it is today. And at this time, Apple still hasn't interfered into the console/AAA market, which is, in a sense, the foundation of the industry. Apple is popularizing casual games and carving out a new market, which is good. Apple is providing a good way for indie developers to distribute their games to a mass audience, which is also good. But at this point I think it's too early to give Apple so much credit, and rankings like these ones are definitely unjustified.
Note: While unjustified, the rankings are understandable, given the craze about mobile/"social" games in the industry.
The London Games Conference is a high-level biz-dev and marketing conference. The questions were asked to readers of MCV - a games industry business and marketing magazine who are also sponsors of the show.
Says the editor of MCV:
“LGC is the only event dedicated to examining the ways connected gaming has transformed video games – we will be welcoming 300 industry professionals to head great leaders speak and discuss hot topics including how smartphone games are transforming the world.”
Jobs just lied to him about the amount of money they got for the project.
actually, he never invented anything with an on/off switch; he claimed so in one of those 60 minute interviews because it reminded him of death
The quote you were referring to:
"ISAACSON: I remember sitting in [Jobs'] backyard in his garden one day and he started talking about God. He said, "Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don't. I think it's 50-50 maybe. But ever since I've had cancer, I've been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of-- maybe it's 'cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn't just all disappear. The wisdom you've accumulated. Somehow it lives on. The he paused for a second and he said 'yeah, but sometimes I think it's just like an on-off switch. Click and you're gone.' He said—and paused again, and he said, "And that's why I don't like putting on-off switches on Apple devices."
[1] Original Mac on/off switch: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/AnOrigina...
[2] LaserWriter (on/off switch is on the left side): http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/wp-content/gallery/gallery_jo...
iOS devices emerging as a popular casual gaming platform is a side effect imho. The credit goes to casual gamers who plays games for time passing. By that same logic one can easily say that Mark Zuckerberg is the pioneer in gaming, in a sense that he brought gaming to 800+ million user.
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 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.
[1] http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/13/video-game-sales-drop-6-pe...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS#System_sales_and_ma...
Surely Apple is capable of getting into this market, but that product doesn't look like anything they are working with now.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I do think that giving Steve Jobs credit as a person is wrong, though. He didn't seem to care much for games. And according to the book, he was against the App Store originally.
I think it's fair to say that devices like the iPhone and iPad will be seen as the originators of this revolution. So maybe that group of avid enthusiasts is a little more insightful than the author is willing to give them credit for.
The problem with this poll is that it works just like "greatest movies of all time" polls. People have the attention span of mayflies.
But given that the responses were:
iPhone: 17%
Wii: 7%
Xbox Live: 3%
PlayStation One: 3%
Steam: 2%
Then again, if you're an avid fan and/or professional, you ought to be polled on things looking forward. Much respect to the original game developers, but anyone who is in the industry today who is going to focus on the great accomplishments in the 8-bit era are going to find themselves in the same trouble as Nintendo's current revenue trend.
Nintendo Wii units shipped: 89 million
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_conso...)
As of March this year, Apple sold 100 million iPhones.
So let's put things in perspective, Nintendo is an absolutely amazing company in the gaming space and has outsold all their competitors (with the exception of Sony PS2) and has sold far more than Apple across their product lines. I am not saying mobile gaming isn't huge (And perhaps handhelds like GameBoy/DS/PSP should be given their credit here), but to give Apple and Steve Jobs credit for shaping the gaming industry more than the real titans of gaming who have actively shaped it for 20 years? Bullshit.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/04/250-million-ios-devices-sol...
I didn't. My message is to please use recent figures for the entire platform, not old sales numbers for just iPhones. Also, nowadays Apple sells more iOS devices than Nintendo sells handhelds and consoles. Nintendo and Sony had a head start, they've been passed by Apple in just four years.
From my observations, facebook has had a much larger impact on gaming than iPhone has. I have plenty of older relatives that'll tend to a virtual farm on facebook but won't play games on their phones.
It's close to the same logic that a pirated game equates to a lost sale, which it does not.
I don't really understand the piracy analogy.
I'm not exactly comparing their purposes but the reasons people buy them. To do a proper comparison you would have to ask every single iOS device owner if they bought the thing for games, as the main reason for the purchase, to compare them with a device that is only good for gaming. You cannot assume to compare purchase numbers between two devices if people buy them for different reasons even if some features of the two products overlap.
It's the same comparison that people keep doing with PCs and consoles. Everybody buys a console for gaming (which is slowly changing, granted) while not everyone who buys a PC does so for gaming.
In fact, I think that apple base turned 100-250 million folks into casual gamers is more influential than yet another console.
I don't think I'm getting my point across very well. I'm not disputing that a large number of people use their iOS devices for gaming, which is good.
I'm just saying that you cannot necessarily compare two devices on a 1-to-1 basis using sales numbers if the two devices are not comparable 1-to-1 in their usage. The iOS devices are versatile in nature and are suitable for multiple tasks. It's not proper to compare every single sale of an iOS device against every single sale of Nintendo's products. You can make estimates and guesses but I don't feel a 1-to-1 comparison can be made nor be fair.
To make a comparison like this I'd rather know the numbers of game titles sold per device. That comparison works for me because the purpose of buying the game is to play it, nothing else.
No it doesn't have to be. Miyamoto is unquestionably the most innovative game designer but Apple really changed the industry from magic in a box to hey the 16 year old down the street just made $10,000 with a game he made by himself.
The future of casual gaming, sure. That’s already true, I would say. However, there are a lot of games that are far better suited to be played on a couch or sitting in a nice comfy chair with a mouse and keyboard, and PCs/consoles are much better suited for that. If anything, the iPhone and iPad have only stolen the market from portable devices like the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. “Real” consoles are hardly threatened.
While, Angry birds and Zynga brought large sections of population into gaming, their involvement in hardcore gaming is still minimal. I will possibly be downvoted for this, but the amount of research that has been contributed by hardcore game development companies far surpasses the amount that casual game developers have produced. There is a visible differentiator between the two segments of gaming - and it will probably always be there.
"Might" as in I don't know how these AAA game publishers are organised internally. If the console division of Capcom sees decreased profits while the mobile division sees increased profits [1], does that mean that people and capital can get reallocated from the console division to the mobile division?
[1] http://www.joystiq.com/2011/10/26/non-mobile-capcom-profits-...
Now, if you're saying that at some point in the future I'll be using my phone for gaming by plugging it into my TV via HDMI and using a keyboard/mouse combo via USB or Bluetooth, then sure. But at that point it's no different than what I'm doing now.
The author is taking this all way too seriously. Who cares what a fan poll at a gaming conference says? I see this type of tunnelvision with video games/television/movie industry types all the time. Why do they think that their industry is so important? Oh my god, who gives a shit.
Maybe that's what you'll get when you ask people to vote for their opinions. The popular candidate and not exactly the right one will win.
Now how about you give us some real insight, Paul Tassi, instead of another rant about something that makes you angry?
It's not that I don't think your argument has some merit, Paul. You're right. Steve Jobs probably gets too much credit for a medium he only had a passing interest in. But you had an opportunity to correct the record, rather than simply ranting about it. A little context goes a long way. As a blogger, it's easy to tell people what you don't like. It's much harder to bring your argument full-circle. If you can succeed at that, it makes your writing essential, rather than a pit stop on the reader's long trip through his Google News feed.
I was, um, mistaken.
Take the below snippet, seemingly the only piece of information the article is pinned against.
"The 1,000 people surveyed are supposed to be avid fans and industry professionals, but they should all have their consoles and computers taken away after giving answers like these."
So it seems his entire article is based on the pretence that the combined thought of these 1,000 people is incorrect.. because he says so.
I don't think cantankerously written, for-hits-only articles belong on "reputable" sites.
The PSP Go and 3DS are niche products that absolutely won't reach the sales of their predecessors. This I guarantee you and you can blame the iPod Touch and the iPhone for that.
I see a future where the Apple TV becomes a low end console, much like the niche Nintendo currently fills, probably at the expense of Nintendo.
I see Nintendo becoming strictly a software house, much like Sega. Nintendo franchises like Zelda and Mario Bros are still valuable. Their hardware business is (IMHO doomed. Because of Apple.
I'm not a console gamer. I never was. PC games were always my thing and sadly PC gaming seems to be dying. Sure it's still big for FPS titles, MMORPGs and the like but my particular favourites (RPGs and turn-based strategy games) are almost nonexistent. Even my guilty pleasure of the GTA franchise seems doomed (GTA4 took 6+ months to come to PC, RDR din't come at all, I wouldn't be surprised if GTA5 doesn't either).
The console market Sony and MS fill is harder to predict. I do kinda think it's seen its peak. Consoles are coming out less often. Mobile gaming and Steam are decreasing the prices people expect to pay for games. The hardware race has resulted in top-tier titles having massive art budgets that I don't think are sustainable in this mobile gaming world.
Plus what you can already do with the iPad 2 (in terms of graphics) is pretty incredible. I hazard to think how good the iPad 3 will be.
By any objective measure Steve Jobs has already had a massive influence on the gaming industry.
I like what sony attempted with the xperia play an android phone with a game pad but, it's sony(who are now tarnished) and it's going to be a niche product so forget good games.
On the mobile and iDevices side, I feel their biggest draw back right now is the input mechanism. Touch is great for a lot of things but in gaming it feels a little weird to me in a lot of genres.
As for the console, well, until now the big 2(sony, microsoft) haven't seen a need to spend money on a bigger console. They are getting to the end but it's not really a longer cycle than the last one looking at this timeline: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_video_game_console_...
Nintendo on the other side has saturated the market for the Wii and needs a new hit or they will die.
>The delivery mechanism on the PC side feel much better than on other platform (I'm completely bias, I even read PC Gamer every month).
That may be but most hated having to constantly deal with the requirements and the high prices needed to meet it. It's the reason the console won out.
>On the mobile and iDevices side, I feel their biggest draw back right now is the input mechanism. Touch is great for a lot of things but in gaming it feels a little weird to me in a lot of genres.
I agree but game designers will have to support multiple ways to interact with games whether it may be through touch, a controller, camera (a la Kinect), voice, etc.
Their hardware business is doomed because of convergence. Standard, custom-built gaming machines will only last so long as having a single consistent target environment requires a custom-built gaming machine.
But personally, I don't really see what that has to do with gaming. Gaming is an art, and I still find games written for the Nintendo just as compelling as they were 20 years ago. All iOS really offers is a better distribution mechanism. And it's still somewhat limited in that you still need to have an expensive piece of locked-down hardware. It's a footnote compared to the first First Person Shooter, top-down RPG, 3D action game, Tower defense game.
It seems silly to talk about hardware when the really interesting stuff is new paradigms in games.
I agree. Nintendo, much like Apple, controlled the hardware and software which allowed them to create a compelling experience.
> All iOS really offers is a better distribution mechanism. And it's still somewhat limited in that you still need to have an expensive piece of locked-down hardware.
i think that mobile is the future of all computing and there will be a day when most are choosing tablets instead of computers. At that point, it will be considerably cheaper to just own a tablet than owning a computer, a console and possibly even a smartphone for some.
And really, RPGs are everywhere on the PC. Nearly every big release for consoles also come out for PC. How could you _not_ hear about Skyrim coming out all week? Most of these big name RPGs are single player too, not MMO in any sense. The RPG genre is different these days, Japan's influence is disintegrating and American publishers have taken over with Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Mass Effect.
iPad gaming won't be a serious industry until it becomes light enough to be held by two hands and upright. It's extremely awkward to hold for more than an hour. Control schemes need improvement too. Perhaps physical buttons aren't necessary, but a standard norm for input needs to be found if it's to relace a physical controller with buttons you can press and that provide feedback.
Finally, iPad and mobile gaming is hugely gimmicky and the big hits are largely based on game mechanics and concepts that are a decade old (I'll admit this is an industry-wide trend). Maybe I'm not looking I the right places but I've yet to find a rich and immersive game for my iPad that captures my attention for 10+ hours like the best of games command. The closest I've found is GTA Chinatown Wars which is a port of the PSP version that is a remake of the DS version.
As a PC gamer, you mention it's dying, but yet the e-Sports scene seems to be the next professional sports arena. As for consoles, they're nowhere near their peak. PS4, Xbox 720, Wii-U... what we're witnessing is a divide between casual gaming and ACTUAL gaming.
Casuals will always be the majority, but to think they'll ride in on mobile horses with iPads is a bit naive. Why? Casual gamers are just that, casual. They have little loyalty to games/studios/platforms, and demand low prices because gaming is insignificant to them.
The day that a mobile platform offers the dexterity and practicality a controller or keyboard/mouse offers, then it can be safely said that the 'writing is on the wall'. But as long as there are 1.6 million dollar tournaments for BF3, grandparents bowling on the Wii, and more than 2x the viewers for eSports tournaments than those that tune in for the NFL draft, the power of Apple has limits.
Whether or not Jobs should take credit for that is irrelevant. What's important is that a revolution is happening in video gaming and all smartphones and tabs, regardless of maker, are playing an absolutely HUGE part in it.
It's a casual gaming revolution - see also facebook - not specifically an iOS gaming revolution.
These people may easily outnumber what you refer to as the "gaming community" and, for them, Jobs was the face of the device they play on most of the time. In short, the article sounds as though it was written by someone living under a rock and/or refusing to acknowledge the revolution afoot.
Given how everyone seemed to be focused on comparing video game industry legends to one another, I thought it was a point worth making. Judging by the downvotes, though, guess not. Oh well.
Forbes Columnists' Influence Massively Self-Inflated
Mine even has the side benefit of being true.
If Bill Gates had died instead, the poll would have shown the same kind of effect, as he would have been in people's minds as they took the poll.