I think it's safe to say at this point that the majority of video game players play on home consoles like the Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and the Nintendo Wii. I'm sure PC gaming is alive and well -- otherwise Big Download wouldn't exist -- but new gamers won't go immediately to a PC when they want to play something. It's not a stretch, then, to say that the existing PC fanbase won't grow significantly in the coming years. Simply put, why buy a computer to play games when there are already dedicated gaming machines that don't require any configuration or tweaking of the system just to play?

In that sense, Windows rules the roost. No one is going to buy a Mac just to play games. PCs have a legacy of great games behind them, games that may be years old but can still be enjoyed today. This can't be said of Macs -- people who want to play games that run on System 9 have to jump through a great many hoops just to get that environment working on OSX, not to mention what else they'll need to do to get the old game installed and playing nicely with the newer innards of their modern Mac. So for a future Mac gaming renaissance to occur, it will require a serious dedication on Apple's part to emulate the history of PC gaming, and provide all the rich infrastructure that's grown up by necessity around PC games. And that's not something that Steve Jobs seems interested in.

Apple's gaming focus is centered on the iPhone, as poor a home for many types of games as it is. Few enough games know how to properly utilize the touchscreen without the user's hand getting in the way of gameplay, and of those games, even fewer present interesting enough gameplay to make a purchase attractive. As the current Hot Thing, however, it's certainly drawn its share of development muscle. This probably won't change for another couple of years, and by then, who knows what New Hot Thing Apple will develop?