Speaking with IndustryGamers, Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello puts the previous Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony-led console market into post-iPad perspective:
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.
So consoles are down by half, and iPad has come out of basically nowhere to become the hottest thing in gaming? Hard core gamers would argue you can't play Call of Duty or World Of Warcraft on an iPad, just like hard core geeks would argue you can't run Xcode/Visual Studio and otherwise use an iPad as a "real computer".
That's true. It just turns out the hard core base is much smaller than the mainstream, and Apple -- and Angry Birds and a host of other, casual titles -- is democratizing the gaming platform just as much as the computer.
And iOS 5 AirPlay mirroring, where you can play your iPad games on the big screen via Apple TV, hasn't even launched yet.
