Michael French for Develop writes about his GDC experience in GDC and the death of the gods. He notes that the gaming gods of the industry—Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo—once offered keynotes that defined the future of the industry, but now the gods are dying, largely due to competition from newcomers. He makes one point that I find particularly interesting:

As journalists like me say, ‘the [blank] happened’. The Internet happened. Facebook happened. iPhone happened. The power shifted. And Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony—they all lost some relevance. They had to share power with platforms that were built, at a macro level at least, to not be so draconian. For better or worse, platforms like the App Store are free markets instead of walled gardens.

In case you didn’t catch that:

platforms like the App Store are free markets instead of walled gardens

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this. At an EA event last year, I spoke to a few developers who’d created games for a number of platforms. They glumly told horror stories of their experiences on the ‘god’ platforms, before brightly saying what a breath of fresh air the relatively open iOS ecosystem is for gaming. Yet we most often only hear about the times when someone at Apple comes down with a bad case of the stupids, rejecting a game or app for spurious reasons, and not the many thousands of games that have ended up on the App Store that simply wouldn’t exist for any other mobile platform.

I’m not suggesting iOS is the most open of platforms, because it clearly isn’t, and it would be great to see the likes of OS X’s Gatekeeper arrive on iOS, providing a little extra freedom regarding apps that can be installed. But open and not-open isn’t black and white—instead there’s a diverse range as you move from one extreme to the other, and this is especially true when it comes to mobile gaming.