Zones said:
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.
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I want to clarify that by real gaming, I mean traditional gaming. So I don't think I need to be lectured about the subjectivity of my definitions; I am very well aware Angry Bird is considered a game and is enjoyed by many.
Anyway, I think you bring one of the points which I wasn't very clear about before; the difficulty of showing the presence of the many titles being released on iOS due to the abundance of them being released daily. Personally, I think the high number of titles being released daily is one of the worst thing happening to this industry, in long-term. I believe the industry standard is getting lower and lower because it used to be that everyone's can be a gamer, not it seems with what Apple has, everyone's can become a game developer.
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And this is bad how?
Given the layoffs, studio closings and the like, I believe its a boon for the industry: Rather than requiring massive financial capital in the tens of millions to release a title on handhelds or consoles, smaller studios can create and release titles freely, thus building portfolios to move on to bigger projects within the smartphone environment, or other environments like PC and console.
Furthermore, the massive number of titles released need not be a significant impediment to the industry. Its more a question of how to properly integrate game discovery into the digital market place. Although its more noted on iOS/Android, it still exists on markets like PSN and XBLA where a few major titles get significant press and have massive evergreen presence, while other games fall off the face of the earth.
Eventually, developers and the app store creators will figure it out and integrate proper tools to ensure that the cream rises to the top. iOS has a ton of great games - its just a matter of promoting and ensuring these games get the recognition they deserve.
