Kenny Hemphill
To be able to do that on the kind of scale on which Apple is now operating, the company will have to do more than just grow its Mac business, increase its share of the smartphone market or sell a few million iPads. When you’re on the cusp of becoming the biggest company in the world, you need to think big, very big. And there’s a great deal of evidence to suggest that to Apple, part of that means taking on Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft head to head in the games market.
It has, of course, already started to do that with the iPhone and iPod touch, and lately with the iPad, too. Together, those iOS devices represent the fastest-growing games platform.
Games on the Mac have taken a turn for the better, too, as you’ll know if you read our cover feature last issue. If you doubt that, just point your browser at steampowered.com and have a look at the Mac titles available. While that’s very welcome for Mac-using games fans, however, it’s iOS that offers the greatest opportunity for Apple. With about 100 million iOS devices sold already, Apple has a huge installed user base. If it’s going to be a serious player in the games market, however, it will need a console for the living room.
That device will have to be able to connect to an HDTV, be powerful enough to cope with the graphics demands of modern games, be capable of connecting directly to the Internet and be accompanied by wireless controllers. It will run iOS – there’s no point in re-inventing the wheel – and so have a huge number of games available for it immediately. And it will need some sort of storage, as streaming games over an Internet connection may just require too much bandwidth to make it feasible.
Apple tends to follow identifiable paths, at least in retrospect, when it produces new products: the iPhone was an iPod with a phone; the iPod touch, an iPhone without the phone, and the iPad, a scaled-up iPhone. Likewise, when the company decided that it wanted to play in the netbook market, it just slimmed down the MacBook Air.
With that in mind, there is, of course, an obvious candidate for an Apple games console: the Apple TV. No, it doesn’t currently run iOS and, yes, Apple did just remove its hard drive. The lack of storage is easy to fix, however. The removal of the hard drive is something that Apple will do across the board, eventually. And it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to imagine the next version of the Apple TV having flash storage on the motherboard, the same as the MacBook Air.
The biggest challenge may be the controllers. iOS is designed with a multi-touch interface. So, it would be reasonable to assume that controllers would need to use the same interface. The iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad have shown that most games can be played quite happily with that kind of interface, but there’s a key difference: in those cases, the same screen acts as display and controller, therefore you naturally look at the controls and your finger positions on them as you play the game. On a console, you look at the big screen and never so much as glance at the controller. Without physical feedback, touch-sensitive buttons would be very tricky.
There is a solution. The iOS also has built-in awareness of hardware sensors that can detect motion, direction, and absolute position. This gives handheld devices using it the ability to be used as a kind of Wii controller, minus the button pad. So the iPhone, iPod touch or iPad, wouldn’t be a million miles from being useful as a games controller. There are key differences, of course. For one thing, the Wii controller uses infrared to communicate with the console. The iOS device would use either wifi or Bluetooth.
More of an issue is cost. It wouldn’t seem to make sense to sell a games console for, say, £99, that then required a £400 iPad, or even a £180 iPod touch in order to use it. And besides, would anyone want to risk an iPhone by waving it around while playing tennis? The answer to that problem would be to allow iPhone owners to use their handheld device to control games if they wanted to, perhaps with the addition of a separate, tethered controller like Nintendo’s nunchuck, while selling a dedicated controller for the rest of us.
There are difficulties to be overcome, but having all but conquered the market for music downloads, and made big inroads in TV and movies, it would seem that console games would be a logical next step for Apple.
