Mobile
EA: Apple Can Take on Sony, Microsoft on Video Game Consoles
Ever since Apple unveiled its $99 Apple TV refresh running on the iOS platform, many have speculated that the company may be exploring apps and games to make the TV “smarter” like the company’s iPhone smartphone. Thus far, Apple has not opened up Apple TV to the gaming experience and has kept the living room set top box strictly for media, but Apple CEO Steve Jobs has stated before that the company is looking into different strategies and is waiting for the right timing.
It seems that Electronic Arts (EA) studio agrees and thinks Apple does have a good chance of succeeding it it entered the living room space, whether it’s via Apple TV and casual iOS gaming or through another means. EA Vice President Patrick Soderlund says “If it was anyone but Apple, I’d say that’s going to be very hard” and adds that “I still think it’s going to be extremely hard for them but they’ve surprised many people before.”
To Apple’s credit, the company did not expect apps to be so successful on the iPhone when the company had opened up the platform for third-party apps and introduced the App Store. At the recent fall Apple music event where the company introduced the fourth generation iPod Touch, Jobs said that the iPod Touch is the most popular portable gaming system on the market, besting the PlayStation Portable from Sony and the Nintendo DS combined.
Apple had recently also introduced Game Center for iOS, which enables for social game play, similar to Xbox Live on Microsoft’s game console.
The success of iOS games has caught many by surprised as Apple had not been known or seen to embrace gaming on the company’s computer products running on OS X.
The relatively cheap $99 price of Apple TV, combined with inexpensive games on iOS can potentially give Apple an advantage over rivals such as Sony and Microsoft. Moreover, the Apple TV’s low asking price can serve as the new halo products if Apple integrates iPads, iPod Touches, and iPhones into the gaming ecosystem as controllers for game play in the living.
Jesse B Andersen
12/04/2010 at 3:21 am
Apple is invading tons of territories. Back in May Satoru Iwata “apparently” told his senios executives that Apple with its iPhone and iPad machines were the “enemy of the future”. We’ll a few months later Apple seems to be doing more than well on the gaming side.
The article was on Kotaku – https://kotaku.com/5533329/report-nintendo-thinks-it-has-won-sees-apple-as-enemy
I hope to see Nintendo come up with some innovative stuff with their Nintendo 3DS. But will it be enough against iOS devices?
Anonymous
12/08/2010 at 7:51 pm
Apple isn’t aiming for the same gaming demographic Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are. Otherwise, they’d at least have a D-Pad and buttons for physical, tactile, precise control. As it stands, the Mac makes a more suitable core gamer platform than iOS, and hardly anyone buys a Mac with gaming in mind when a custom-built PC gets far more performance for one’s money and most games are Windows-based anyway (likely thanks to DirectX’s dominance in the industry).
Sure, there are many sorts of games that could work with just touchscreens and accelerometers, maybe a camera and gyroscope too. Tabletop games (board and card games in particular), turn-based strategy games, maybe racing games, but releasing FPSs and hardcore platformers requiring the utmost in precision to dodge insta-death spikes and such on the devices is doing it wrong.
That said, the new Apple TV may have the makings of a cheap game console centered on digital distribution if they release a standardized controller for it that the developers can build their games around. I wouldn’t expect anything on par with the dedicated consoles, let alone a proper gaming computer, but iPad-level performance should be feasible.