In 2008, Steve Jobs wasn’t a very popular man among gamers. Faulting him for what they considered a colossal waste of opportunity, a vocal horde of developers, pundits and gamers alike lambasted the former Apple CEO for keeping games out of the spotlight on the wildly popular iPhone and iPod Touch. When the turtlenecked executive held TIME Magazine’s Invention of the Year aloft, they saw an elegant interface, an accelerometer and a gorgeous screen. With the debut of the App Store, developers salivated at the idea of distributing unique, budget-priced games to an exploding install base.
Jobs, though, saw a productivity booster. A Web browser, pocketbook and phone all rolled into one. In his iOS utopia of mobile business and chic leisure, gaming was a second-class citizen, an image-sullying embarrassment.
As far as game-makers were concerned, Jobs’ hyper-regulated App Store was a hostile place for business. At the time, Apple controlled a non-negotiable portion of sales revenue over the service, didn’t support patching or updates and failed to give developers a proper avenue for distributing pre-release games to critics.
As one of those iPhone-wielding skeptics back in ’08, I cracked a smile on Tuesday reading through coverage of Apple’s first Jobs-less keynote. Fresh off Jobs’ departure from the role, Apple boss Tim Cook was widely expected to open his reign with a showstopper; namely, the iPhone 5. He didn’t. The only ace–or maybe jack or queen, depending on who you ask–up Cook’s sleeve was the somewhat underwhelming iPhone 4S.
What piqued my interest, though, was a less explicit trend behind the headlines. Without the nuclear mojo of a truly new iPhone to usher in his term atop the Mac-maker, Cook leaned on another of Apple’s pillars to show that he meant business. You guessed it: Cook was hardly shy Tuesday about championing the success and advancement of games on iOS.
That’s not to say that Cook’s ascent signals a new age of pro-game policy from Apple–at least, not on its own. Rather, it’s a subtle sign of an extensive, quiet transformation. I give some credit to Jobs for slowly changing his tune toward gaming over the years, but Cook is well aware that even without Apple’s encouragement, the iPhone has become an absolute monster of modern video games. In that sense, he’s inherited an accidental empire.
Cook started off the keynote, of course, with some chest-pumping over Macs, iTunes and the upcoming iOS 5. But games were right there in the mix.
Cook made it clear that “one area you really see [the iPhone 4S] scream is in games” and took time to boast about cloud saves and persistent profile supportwith the upcoming iOS 5, launching this Wednesday. He even welcomed developer Chair Entertainment, a subsidiary of Epic Games, to show off an Infinity Blade II trailer that looked excellent by any standard.
It was no E3 presentation to be sure, but Apple gave games more time and attention in yesterday’s keynote than most of those ’08 skeptics would ever have guessed. Jobs would likely have done so in his own time anyway–it’s hard not to with games bringing in so much cash–but Cook seems to have made a small but important paradigm shift in the company’s outlook. Apple isn’t just standing by as small developers flourish despite roadblocks in the iOS infrastructure; it’s actively promoting games, pouring money into advertisements and new features and–gasp–catering to the same core gamers that it so rapidly distanced itself from several years ago.
Apple’s little turnaround is more cold capitalism than a warm and fuzzy embrace of gamers, but it’s remarkable nonetheless. Three years ago, few would have predicted the place of games in Tuesday’s address, much less their overall place on the iOS platform. Entire companies are built around iOS development, from colossi like Gameloft to one-man heartwarmers like Andreas Illiger (Tiny Wings). Franchises like Angry Birds have already outsold Mario, innovation thrives with simple development tools and traditional third – party devs like Epic and id–Carmack’s id, let’s remember–flex their graphical muscles on iOS in ways normally reserved for HD consoles. It’s also the first successful game-player with an exclusively digital distribution infrastructure, and–perhaps most impressively–has Nintendo and Sony’s portable divisions spending a bit more time at the drawing board.
UPDATE: As you are no doubt aware, Steve Jobs passed away earlier this week. I want to extend my sincerest condolences to his friends and family and make it clear to readers that this article was written in its entirety, as you see it above, before I learned of Jobs’ passing. It is in no way an obituary or retrospective on his life.