Who is the biggest influence in gaming?
 

This might come as a surprise...

EDIT: Clearly people are forgetting even more influential persons.....like Thomas Edison, the man who helped to create electricity.

EDIT2: More info http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/count...he-core/087090

EDIT3: If anyone wants I can name at least 100 people who deserve 3 of those spots

And nobody cared when Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy died the same year as that guy. Jobs has my respect as a businessman, but that's all there's to him. He was no wiz in any field. And he could have won the whole market decades ago, if only he could have understood that in some circumstances one can make more profit with lower margins. Instead he was obsessed with charging as much as possible for each unit, regardless of the lousy specs, and that's why he got owned by IBM, and later by Microsoft, that was a tiny upstart when Apple was already big. He never hid his deep dislike for competition. At the end he managed to make some money with toys marketed as luxury items, good for him.

HIPSTERS...! :doh:

PS: Edison is nowhere near the top of the people to be credited with the discovery of electricity. He was a practical engineer with little scientific knowledge, and a cut-throat businessman.

The question is a bit stupid really where would gaming be without Alan Turing not to mention the creator of the Atari and Commodore 64.

The conference is about the "digital games market", which if you think about it like that then they are sort of right. The AppMarket brought small games to many people digitally, same with Facebook. They didn't answer the question "Who is the biggest influence in gaming?" they answered "Who is the biggest influence in digital game markets.".

*cough* Neumann János *cough*

Well, if we're allowed to stray a little bit... Wi-Fi and mobile devices owe her something, don't you think? (read the middle part, when you stop drooling at her photos :D )

If we take gaming as a cultural phenomenon, and not from a pure business perspective, even if we talk about digital games, Steve Jobs shouldn't be on the top spot. Of course thanks to the App Store, various categories of people started playing games, but what kind of games are we talking about? Mostly crap, as most game critics have been constantly saying.

But this poll's biggest problem is that it equals a CEO with its company (eg Steve Jobs=Apple, Zucky=Facebook). Was App Store Jobs' own vision, or the product of Apple's most briliant minds and copycats? I sincerely don't know. Too lazy to look into it.

Hmm Darth, I'm not sure if you know what the word "digital" means in this context, but I'm pretty sure all computers are digital. If you mean handheld gaming device, and even if you disqualify any such one from back in the 90s and earlier, because they didn't have a GSM phone in it... And Jobs didn't invent what was called the PDA either.

The fact that all journalists use Apple doesn't mean everyone else does, not to mention that there are games for other smartphones too. And in no country is the iPhone the smartphone with most market share, Android is usually on top, certainly in the US and the UK.

http://i102.photobucket.com/download...aysitsafad.jpg
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Baer

I think the reason these people love Steve Jobs is that he gave them a digital distribution version of Poundland

Japo the way the news reports are done it makes it clear that they aren't talking about normal gaming. But digital methods of getting games to people. It makes sense when you think about who they voted for, Jobs for the Appmarket, Valve for steam and Micorsoft for Xbox live.

"London Games Conference is focused on the digital games market," "GameStop and Valve, plus talks delivered by Sega, OnLive and PopCap"

A lot of the people there are people who deal in online methods of getting games to people. They thought about the question in a way we aren't, not gaming as a whole but just getting games to people digitally. Not saying they are right just that they are thinking about this in a different way to us.

In that case, how did the first Playstation get in the 4th spot?

Not all of them are stupid? Or some of them understand more about gaming then just the digital downloads and app markets they are making games for?

Not all games on the iPhone/pods/pads are just crud some are rather good. I had a great Zedla style RPG that was tons of fun to play. I don't think Steve should be anywhere on this list, but naming one thing that made a big change to gaming is a bit hard. There are so many things that made big changes and from different peoples perspectives Steve has done so (Or at least apple).

Steve Jobs? Yeah sure, if it were not for Ralph Baer, we'd have no such thing as a console or video game. If it weren't for Neumann János, we wouldn't have fully electronic computers which are programmable to do more then one thing in the first place :p

OK, now I get your/their meaning. But if they're using the word "digital" as a synonym of "online", you shouldn't follow their example. :P Floppies were digital too; punchcards were digital; a lot of electronic chips in your car, washing machine, etc. are digital. Of course the Internet is digital as well.