I was thinking more like Satoru Iwata should be number 1. And Miyamoto deserves to be in top 10, if not the top 5.

Nope, I don't agree. Maybe in the mobile games industry; not the video gaming industry.

I agree, given that he pretty much holds the fate of the video games industry in the palm of his hand

I find it odd that I didn't see anyone from NVidia or AMD/ATI on the list. Also, Mark Rein should probably be higher on the list. How many games use Unreal engine? I'd possibly also have Gabe Newell a bit higher considerring his influence on PC gaming at the moment.

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.

The real answer is George Soros, since he has enough money to buy everything.

Tim Cook is a powerful man, but the most powerful in video games? I don't think so.

Mario and Luigi are currently most powerful in video games. They get more gold coins than Wario now!

If you get the money, you get the power.  Tony Montana said something like that once.

I'd definitely put Iwata on top. Nintendo is the most influential video game company. They've sold more dedicated gaming hardware than any two other companies combined, and they are consistently one of the top 3 (usually #1) video game publishers every year. And Satoru Iwata is the man in charge of that company, calling the shots, directing the development of the DS and Wii, now 3DS and Wii U.

It's a combination of Iwata's business savy and the simple scale of Nintendo as a company. Nintendo owns Mario. There are scarce few icons in ANY medium that can compete with Mario in terms of cultural recognition, and Apple doesn't own any of them.