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Of course media isn’t the only thing that a new Apple TV might offer. If it is indeed an iOS device, then you have to look at other kinds of apps as well, and for those plunked in front of a big ol’ TV, that means games. As the Xbox, PS3, and Wii have demonstrated, gaming boxes that also happen to play media are a popular item, particularly around the holidays. Provide an Apple TV that can play high-resolution games—with surround sound, an HDMI connection, and hardware controllers, yet—and you’ve got a fairly formidable hunk of hardware sitting next to your TV—formidable enough, in fact, that many people may forget all about its inability to play Blu-ray discs or record TV broadcasts.
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Pondering Apple’s September 1 media event | iPod & Entertainment | Playlist | Macworld
This is a nice idea, gaming on an Apple TV, and I’m sure it would have some draw for casual gamers but that’s a hard space to enter with three firmly embedded consoles covering the full spectrum from casual to hard-core. The problem is that Apple doesn’t have any of the big connections with game developers of ‘high-resolution’ games.
Unless they’re working with Valve that is.
If they take an App Store approach and present an iOS API familiar to developers making games on the iOS devices they could do really well. But they need the adoption rate to compel developers of current iOS devices already maintaining three different resolutions & UI conventions for their games to add a fourth to their support list.
I don’t want to say that it will never happen, but it feels like they’ve got the cards stacked against them (not that they haven’t overcome that before) but it’s a direction Apple hasn’t moved on in the past. Does the target audience for an Apple TV want to play games? Is that a bonus or a killer feature for them? Doesn’t seem like it to me, but it will be interesting to see where this could go.
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christopherdwhite posted this
