Former president of Sony Computer Entertainment’s Worldwide Studios, Phil Harrison, has stated that the growth rate of Apple‘s ecosystem is so large that in a decades time there’s a chance Apple may own the gaming industry.

At this trajectory, if you extrapolate the market-share gains that they are making, forward for ten years – if they carry on unrestrained in their growth, then there’s a pretty good chance that Apple will be the games industry.

He talks about the shopping experience and its advantage over mainstream gaming:

The fact that the consumer purchase and discovery mechanism is so well integrated – you see something on the App Store, you click a button, the product delivers to your device. That end-to-end shopping experience, if you want to call it that, has been so elegantly built by Apple and they will continue to refine it.

He also explains how the current model of buying high priced games on stagnant hardware is almost at an end:

I think the future for the dedicated console as it is currently constructed, from chips and hard drives that you buy once and games that you buy at $60 or £40 a time; that business model is almost at the end of its life.

Of course this is only one mans opinion but it shows how even higher up executives are thinking and how the shift to OTA applications and cheaper games everywhere is on the horizon. On how 6 years of gaming on the same hardware is now being seen as more absurd than ever before. With Apple pushing hardware out every year and the capability of that hardware being able to game HD level graphics, what will be the difference of playing a sports game for $10 on your iPad plugged it a TV than playing the same game for $60 on a PS3?

(via Next Gen)