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.

I don't think the gaming industry is dying anytime soon, no matter how many shitty $0.99 apps Apple puts on the App Store.

I agree and I am okay with what you are saying, but not on expense of what has made this industry where it is today. What I mean by this is, the real gaming is becoming more and more irrelevant, it's like real gaming becoming second to iOS gaming.

I know that's currently not the case, but that’s becoming more apparent day after day.

A full transition to the new handheld generation just hasn't started yet. 3DS needs a competitor with PSV in addition to a price cut. It's much too early to tell wether high tech mobile phones (and Apple) are taking away from the traditional 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

I don't think accidental is the right word, have you forgotten that apple wants world domination!?

Your first paragraph is pure bullshit. Angry Birds competes with thousands of games priced between free and $15 and it wins because it's accessible, fun, challenging, polished, and offers great value. It's massively successful because people love it, and that doesn't give a false impression of what a great game is, that's exactly what a great game is.

Your second paragraph just misses the point. Why are big budgets important? What's important is that consumers get games that they have fun playing, and developers get paid enough to make a decent profit on their investment. Big budgets are only useful if they bring the people more fun (in which case they'll pay for them) or developers more money (which would again require people to pay for them). If iOS really is killing big budget games, that inherently means big budgets aren't doing their job and they need to go.

I'm not sure what relevance knockoffs have to anything. Every successful game franchise or genre inspires mediocre knockoffs. C'est la vie. If Gameloft really can deliver all the fun of Uncharted at a fraction of the cost, then they win. You worry about a lack of originality, but this console generation has brought us 6 Call of Duty games and 5 Halo games (excluding Halo Wars) so far. That's before we get to the knockoffs. Originality is a rare thing in any medium.

And I will still hold true with confidence for the next few years as both Vita and 3DS fail to meet the unit sales of their predicessors. Certainly, 3DS's price and lineup contribute to the lack of sales, but I still believe the main issue is that there are other, better comparables out there.

Still though, 3DS has certainly underwhelmed thus far, and I attribute that to it being more advantageous to purchase a smart phone and play its touch-screen games vs. buying another touch-screen device. Nintendo adding so many smartphone features to the device tells me that Nintendo knows its competing with such devices, and is trying to make it a reasonable value proposition to drop the money on the device - but I simply can't see the proposition for it.

That's exactly what I mean by kill.

By the way, great post, thanks for the input.

But what exactly makes a "killer app"? I used to think that a great game is likely to become a killer app, but now really, killer app mostly can be achieved by having something different, not necessarily better.

Examples of killer apps on DS were Brain Age, Nintendogs, etc. now I am not sure if Nintendo can replicate such success by bringing that sort of unique experience to the platform.