Steve Jobs is Named Most Influential Person In Gaming

[Demon_Skeith]

Move over, Miyamoto. Step aside, Steam. The games industry says former Apple CEO Steve Jobs and the iPhone were most influential thing to happen to interactive entertainment.

A survey of over 1,000 industry execs has put the two at the top of the league tables when it comes to which products and which people have had the most impact on video games.

The questions were part of a survey conducted by Intent Media ahead of the London Games Conference, which takes place next week on Thursday, November 10th at One Wimpole Street.

Jobs and the iPhone came out ahead of Valve co-founder Gabe Newell, Facebook inventor Mark Zuckerburg and the Nintendo Wii and Xbox Live. The top fives from the survey can be found to the right.

London Games Conference is focused on the digital games market, and features keynotes from GameStop and Valve, plus talks delivered by Sega, OnLive and PopCap. The event is sponsored by IGN and InComm.

Top five people to have shaped video games
1 Steve Jobs
2 Gabe Newell (co-founder and managing director of Valve)
3 Shigeru Miyamoto (developer of Mario, Donkey Kong, Zelda)
4 Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the world wide web)
5 Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook)

Top five products to have shaped video games
1 Apple's iPhone
2 Nintendo Wii console
3 Xbox Live
4 The original PlayStation console
5 Steam (digital distribution)

source

da hell with this s***! Steve jobs has nothing to do with gaming!

 

[GracefulAssassin]

Complete bias. I see why they think he was good to gaming, but bull, there a lot more people important to gaming.

 

[hissae2]

Shigeru Miyamoto should be #1.

 

[Naiwen]

Hum... this person must be completely out of it when he or she wrote it... Because apple's iphones don't even have that much games in them. just some flash games.

 

[GracefulAssassin]

Wait, wtf? MARK ZUCKERBERG? Alright, this list is shit.

 

[VirusZero]

While I would not call him the most influential, I would admit that Steve Jobs has been influential. He created a platform for developers to create small, easy to create (compared to AAA titles like Halo or Uncharted), quick, fun games and sell them for cheap. He indeed redefined the gaming industry when he did because soon after this took off XBL, PSN and the Virtual Store all started copying it, spawning a brand new indie scene of game development. So in that respect, he really did influence gaming.

Mark Zuckerberg is there because of the facebook games. How many times have you heard people getting sucked into the social games like Farmville? Spending hours, even days playing this one little game. He brought gaming to thousands who before this probably wouldn't have played a game at all. Though admittedly this one is a bit of a stretch...


I can see how steam is important... But honestly, if it weren't for Shigeru Miyamato then Gabe Newell wouldn't have dropped out of University to go make games (Newell apparently dropped out after playing Super Mario 64 to pursue a career in game development). So I'd put Mr. Miyamato higher on the list and probably omit Gabe Newell. Perhaps replace him with Gunpei Yokoi (creator of the massively successful gameboy platform which dominated the handheld market and secured Nintendo's position as a force to be reckoned with in gaming) or Ken Kutaragi (the "Father of the Playstation")

 

[Yoshi]

All I have to say is Half-Life. That seats Gabe Newell as one of the most influential persons in gaming.