Steve Jobs Named Most Influential Man in Gaming

The London Games Conference named Steve Jobs the most influential person in gaming, and Apple's iPhone the biggest product to shape the industry.

The conference surveyed 1,000 people in the industry and gave Jobs 26 percent of the overall votes and the iPhone 17 percent. Jobs beat Gabe Newell (16 percent, co-founder of Valve) Shigeru Miyamoto (7 percent, creator of Mario, Donkey Kong and Zelda) Tim Berners-Lee (4 percent, inventor of the World Wide Web) and Mark Zuckerberg (3 percent, founder of Facebook).

Behind the iPhone in the top five products category was Nintendo's Wii at 7 percent, Xbox Live at 3 percent, the first PlayStation with 3 percent and Steam (a digital distribution service from Valve) with 2 percent of the total votes.

Just last March, Apple announced at a press event it sold more than 100 million iPhones to date worldwide. Angry Birds, the most popular game on the iPhone, just hit 500 million downloads Nov. 8. But Jobs and his invention's influence go beyond sales numbers. If this survey was a numbers game the Nintendo DS would have won since it has sold about 150 million units since its 2004 launch.

It seems that Jobs has captured the imagination of the industry and changed the way developers have thought about games and the way they are distributed.

In just over three years the iPhone and the App Store have transformed what consumers expect of games, and how the industry makes and sells them - today, download games have come to the fore. Steve Jobs, the iPhone's driving force, was the ultimate independent developer - uncompromising in his vision, with unquestionable influence, and hugely artistic and commercial results, Michael French, editor-in-chief of MCV, the leading trade magazine of the video games industry, said on the conference's site.

The LGC is an annual conference that examines how the increasing amount of connectedness in gaming affects the industry. The conference will be held Nov. 10 in Central London.