Tim Cook is the most powerful man in the videogames industry - do you agree?

[famousringo]

TruckOSaurus said:

Andrespetmonkey said:
I guess Tim is in theory the most powerful. Apple could buy Activision, EA, 2K, SE and Ubisoft, create their own console or gaming service and make all the games from those publishers exclusive to their console or service if they wanted... they have more than enough money to do so. That won't happen though. I wonder what they're planning to do with the tens of billions of dollars they're sitting on... but that's for another thread.

You can't rank Tim Cook as the most powerful man in the video game industry for what he could do. You have to look at what he currently does and I think the iPhone and iPad are not enough to make him that powerful.

I'm inclined to agree. The best way to measure how much influence a business (and by extension, that business's leaders) has over gaming is to consider how much revenue they earn from gaming, and how much they invest back into gaming.

Apple doesn't invest a heck of a lot, relative to their operations. They provide the App Store, which does an equally good job of meeting the needs of non-gaming products. They provide Game Center and other game-centric APIs for developers, though Apple itself has no game development. And they make sure their mobile devices are equipped with best-in-class GPUs, though again, this also serves to ensure a high-quality user experince in non-game software.

How much revenue Apple sees from gaming is hard to estimate. Annual gross revenue in the App Store is estimated to be $4 billion dollars per year, and I think assuming that half that revenue goes to games is a conservative estimate (according to my iPhone, 21 of the 25 top-grossing apps right now are games). So Apple could be said to be taking in about $2 billion dollars of gaming software revenue annually.

How much of Apple's hardware revenues can be attributed to gaming? We can never know.

Nintendo is much easier to figure out. For fiscal 2012, Nintendo reported revenues of 259 billion yen ($3.3 billion USD). On top of that, Nintendo sold 388 billion yen ($4.9 billion USD) worth of hardware, which we know was all about gaming.

I think it's pretty safe to say that in the immediate future, Satoru Iwata still holds more sway over gaming than Tim Cook does. And that's apart from the fact that while games are Nintendo's bread and butter, they're just one of many types of content that Apple sells and promotes.