I guess gaming has “arrived”

[Update: I realized this morning that I didn’t make clear that I’m talking about coverage in places other than gaming news sites. Clearly this *is* major news within the gaming industry, but I was referring to sites that don’t cover games as a primary focus, yet they were still covering this story.]

I was astounded at the number of words that were generated today after the news broke that Electronic Arts was purchasing iOS game publisher Chillingo.

I mean, here’s a company that publishes (they aren’t developers) $2 iPhone games and it seemed like every tech blog covered the story. It wasn’t even that big a purchase ($19 million).

I guess part of the coverage stemmed from so many blogs getting the story wrong initially, referring to Chillingo as the developer of Angry Birds. Roxio, Rovio [Ha! Even I can’t get it right, thanks to Scopique for pointing out my error.] the outfit who actually developed Angry Birds, which was self-published on Android, was understandably annoyed and spent the day doing damage control and trying to get things set to right.

Granted Chillingo does seem to have an eye for promising properties (they also published ZeptoLab’s Cut the Rope on iOS) but still, just a few years ago this purchase would’ve barely warranted a mention in tech news. And it isn’t like it was just a slow news day today, what with Apple’s “Back to Mac” yawnfest event.

So a few years ago, tiny coverage. Today, big but inaccurate coverage. Maybe a few years in the future gaming will warrant big, accurate coverage.