I've said it many times: Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony need to be worried about... Apple. The iPad (more than the iPhone IMHO) is becoming and will become a massive gaming platform.
The move towards 3D realism on modern consoles (Xbox360, PS3 and successors) has driven up costs, driven down release cycles and basically given things that many (if not most) people don't actually care that much about.
The App Store has proven there is a serious market for lower-priced games with wide distribution, something the content industry as a whole has failed of grasp over the last decade or more in spite of the mountains of evidence to the contrary.
Certainly 3D realistic games (AAA FPS titles, for example) are very expensive to make. However, many of them also have fantastic returns and have generated extraordinary revenues. Just as in the movie industry there is a place for both high and low production values.
Modern Warfare 2, for example, was the highest grossing entertainment launch in history, including blockbuster movies, making a third of a billion dollars in a single day. Today only perhaps 2 or 3 films have had higher box office revenues than Modern Warfare 2 has made. No sane person would pass up a chance for such revenues. More so when you consider that at that scale games cost far less than movies to produce: MW2 cost about $60 million to make, whereas Avatar had a budget of $237 million, Titanic had a budget of $200 million, and even the Return of the King had a budget of $94 million.
Hollywood seems to be chugging along just fine, and the gaming industry seems to have lower costs and comparable revenues.
This assumes a massive number of serious developers making games for the platform. That has yet to materialize, every discussion of iPad games falls to token successful titles readily available on other systems.
Console makers license tons of exclusive content, Apple just isn't getting into the game software game(yet?).
Developers of small inexpensive games target the larger, established PC market, and iDevices get the runoff.
Compare the sales of indy games on steam(one example) vs. any apple platform.
My personal opinion is that the iPad over-hypes the few games it has because it fails as a useful work tool, it's an expensive toy. Limited use as a web platform will not be enough to establish a game platform, software always does. Time will tell, I might be wrong.
The move towards 3D realism on modern consoles (Xbox360, PS3 and successors) has driven up costs, driven down release cycles and basically given things that many (if not most) people don't actually care that much about.
The App Store has proven there is a serious market for lower-priced games with wide distribution, something the content industry as a whole has failed of grasp over the last decade or more in spite of the mountains of evidence to the contrary.