EA: Apple can challenge Sony, MS in console war

[famousringo]

Khuutra said:

Squilliam said:

liu777 said:

Apologies, but I wasn't referring to the handhelds but to home consoles. Thought that was implied. 

Its just that its common for people to forget that games are a significant part of iTunes so in a peripheral way they are involved in the game industry even though they aren't involved in the core game industry.

The iOS platform brings up an interesting conundrum as a platform for game sales; by the same token, would Valve be part of the games industry, or is this limited only to people making hardware on which sales platforms can operate? Would that make Dell part of the industry? Where is that line drawn?

Doesn't Dell own Alienware? That seems to be a pretty gaming-oriented brand to me. I would certainly say that Valve is, since they not only operate a social and distribution network, but they make games themselves.

I would argue that a company is only "in the gaming industry" so much as it invests capital for the purpose of fostering games. In this regard, Nintendo is obviously huge, since they operate two hardware platforms and a huge amount of development and publishing resources.

Apple is relatively tiny, but ramping up. Three years ago it made roughly zero investment to foster games. Now it's adding social networks (Game Center), APIs, and hardware (gyroscopes) designed with gaming in mind. It's even working with Valve to improve Mac gaming and in the next version of Mac OS will try to recreate the massive success of the App Store, which is largely driven by game sales.

If I load up the App Store right now, I see five of the top ten grossing iPad apps are games. On iPhone, it's eight out of ten. This game market first landed in Apple's lap with hardly any serious effort, but now that it's here, the company is quite aware of how important games are to its mobile platform.