Did Apple accidentally enter and kill the videogame industry?

[Mr Khan]

mrstickball said:
Apple stumbled into the market about as much as Facebook has.

That is, their gaming market was a by-product of their innovations, and not the central focus. As for your question - if apple has effected the industry, its obvious they have. 3DS isn't selling well, and I believe that iOS and other app stores are largely responsible. I predicted this years ago well before the 3DS was even announced. It was inevitable for consumers to change their preferences to a device that had more features and opportunities to offer content to the population, while offering a very similar gameplay experience.

The real question is what does Apple do to encourage their gaming and application ecosystem. Product discovery on mobiles is the real issue: hundreds of thousands of applications, with only a few hundred being usually known to consumers at any given time. Microsoft is doing a great job with WM7 and their XBL integration - smaller numbers of very well-done games to a high degree get marquee placing and discovery options, while non-XBL games are allowed and put in another market.

If Apple can fix this, it can improve its ecosystem to eventually wipe out Nintendo and Sony's share of the market, or at least force them into even more synergistic devices Sony's Xperia Play (which is in the right direction, IMO).

Finally, the idea of a 'real game' and qualifying it with a subjective argument is baseless. Just because you don't think something like Angry Birds a game does not mean it isn't any less a game, played as a game, or sold as a game. Its sold/downloaded hundreds of millions of copies at a speed that Bejeweled 2 hasn't even seen.

Furthermore, we're only at the start of what gaming will be on smartphones. We've gone from mostly simplistic, time-wasting $0.99 games to seeing more and more games of significant quality from major studios. Given the sales of Infinity Blade, we will see more studios work to build large games for touchscreens, and successes that are very notable in the emerging market.

Given that the 3DS still lacks killer apps, its performance has piss-all to do with the iOS devices

That statement could be made with more confidence if 3DS fails to kick into gear after this holiday season, but for now we can primarily attribute its malaise to the lack of reasons for buying the device as if it were in a vacuum