http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/04/250-million-ios-devices-sol...
It's close to the same logic that a pirated game equates to a lost sale, which it does not.
I don't really understand the piracy analogy.
I'm not exactly comparing their purposes but the reasons people buy them. To do a proper comparison you would have to ask every single iOS device owner if they bought the thing for games, as the main reason for the purchase, to compare them with a device that is only good for gaming. You cannot assume to compare purchase numbers between two devices if people buy them for different reasons even if some features of the two products overlap.
It's the same comparison that people keep doing with PCs and consoles. Everybody buys a console for gaming (which is slowly changing, granted) while not everyone who buys a PC does so for gaming.
In fact, I think that apple base turned 100-250 million folks into casual gamers is more influential than yet another console.
I don't think I'm getting my point across very well. I'm not disputing that a large number of people use their iOS devices for gaming, which is good.
I'm just saying that you cannot necessarily compare two devices on a 1-to-1 basis using sales numbers if the two devices are not comparable 1-to-1 in their usage. The iOS devices are versatile in nature and are suitable for multiple tasks. It's not proper to compare every single sale of an iOS device against every single sale of Nintendo's products. You can make estimates and guesses but I don't feel a 1-to-1 comparison can be made nor be fair.
To make a comparison like this I'd rather know the numbers of game titles sold per device. That comparison works for me because the purpose of buying the game is to play it, nothing else.
I didn't. My message is to please use recent figures for the entire platform, not old sales numbers for just iPhones. Also, nowadays Apple sells more iOS devices than Nintendo sells handhelds and consoles. Nintendo and Sony had a head start, they've been passed by Apple in just four years.
From my observations, facebook has had a much larger impact on gaming than iPhone has. I have plenty of older relatives that'll tend to a virtual farm on facebook but won't play games on their phones.
Nintendo Wii units shipped: 89 million
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_conso...)
As of March this year, Apple sold 100 million iPhones.
So let's put things in perspective, Nintendo is an absolutely amazing company in the gaming space and has outsold all their competitors (with the exception of Sony PS2) and has sold far more than Apple across their product lines. I am not saying mobile gaming isn't huge (And perhaps handhelds like GameBoy/DS/PSP should be given their credit here), but to give Apple and Steve Jobs credit for shaping the gaming industry more than the real titans of gaming who have actively shaped it for 20 years? Bullshit.