There’s a saying that the best camera you have is the one that’s always with you, which explains why today most people don’t bother buying dedicated point and shoots and instead prefer to use their smartphone. Just last month we reported that Apple’s iPhone 4 is the most popular camera on the photo sharing site Flickr. This same logic can be applied to games. While no one is saying a $5 game in either the Android Market or Apple App Store is the same as Gears of War 3 for the XBOX 360, we challenge you to find anyone who lugs around their HDTV and possibly a power generator to enjoy the odd round of capture the flag. Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello recently told IndustryGamers in an interview that: “Consoles used to be 80% of the industry as recently as 2000. Consoles today are 40% of the game industry, so what do we really have? We have a new hardware platform and we’re putting out software every 90 days. Our fastest growing platform is the iPad right now and that didn’t exist 18 months ago.”
John goes on to argue that with today’s current generation of consoles we get more than enough graphic performance, and that at some point the industry is going to stop trying to make realistic looking games and go back to being creative. Words like that send shivers down our spines since many of us at the IntoMobile office remember our youths and how obsessed we were with gaming, but then all of a sudden everything started going to hell as yet another World War II themed first person shooter was announced, month after month. Curiously, we never really considered the iPad to that good of a gaming platform. Are you guys playing games on your iPad much? If so, which titles?
We’re eager to jump back into the groove.