With the addition of the Xbox-Live-like Game Center to iPhone OS 4.0, Apple has finally made a serious commitment to gamers and game developers after nearly a decade of ignoring them on the OS X platform.
Expect that commitment to continue to deepen: Nintendo games expert and journalist Matt Casmassina of IGN has just been hired by Apple as their new Global Editorial Games Manager.
“Anybody who has read my work through the years will know that I’ve long been a huge Nintendo fan, but if there is one company that could entice me away from covering Mario and Zelda it’s the one owned by Steve Jobs. Beginning early May, I will join Apple as global editorial games manager, App Store,” Casamassina wrote on his blog.
“In a nutshell, I will be leading the charge for games on the App Store, so whether you browse through iTunes, iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, the games content you see will be handpicked and organized by me and my team. I couldn’t be happier.”
This is a dream job for a games enthusiast: Casamassina is now going to help define the direction of the most vibrant games marketplace on earth. But it’s also a bittersweet moment for a Nintendo enthusiast: Casmassina might well end up helping decimate the business of the very company that he’s loyally spent decades covering.
After all, if a guy like Casamassina — who has spent his entire career obsessively covering just one company — is now abandoning Nintendo, how far behind can the public be? Perhaps that’s why Apple hired Matt to begin with… they’re starting to get serious about directly combating Nintendo.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
