Interesting.
3rd party game controller for apple tv. Was hoping for that.
3rd party game controller for apple tv. Was hoping for that.
I read a blog post recently, that got me TOTALLY excited about the prospect of an AppleTV - https://syrah.co/joshdickson40/55ee7b652450db710180a79b
The TL;DR is that if Apple made your iOS device the controller for the game on the TV, that changes everything.
Imagine that...game developers can design and program controllers for their games. That may be a bit confusing for some, and there may be some standardization that is needed....but just the idea blew my mind.
Imagine a game where I can play with my 3 kids. But, the controls for my 2-year old (on my iPad) are different than the controls for my 5-year old (on my iPod) which are different than the controls for my 7-year old (another iPad) and myself (an iPhone).
But we all experience the game fully, relatively easily, in our own way.
Oh man....that got me so excited....alas...that was not meant to be.
One can only hope that it comes in the future...because that would most definitely unlock a whole new generation of casual gamers that no console could dream of unlocking.
Apple has an amazing casual market and it makes more sense to capitalize on that.
Having said that do you care to elaborate on your first claim. Not sure I understand where you are getting that from.
1. The gaming community is one of the most critical, volatile, toxic cultures I've ever seen. See: Gamergate. This isn't a comment on individuals, just the collective. This is where my impression of whiny, entitled children comes from.
2. Apple seems quite comfortable in the casual gaming community.
3. Coming out with their own hardware would be a commitment to gaming that would open themselves up to actually WANTING the criticism of the gaming community. I don't see Apple relishing this at the moment, especially after the Apple Watch flop and the introduction of a stylus 8 years late.
I think Apple wants to focus their own design energy on the broadest customer base, which means casual gamers. Based on that, it makes sense that they would basically deliver their rendition of the Wii-mote. It's interesting to compare it to the FireTV remote as well.
Honestly, there's a lot of "hard core game" controllers out there and they all fit in the mold of the XBox/Playstation dual-stick model. It's a smaller market, and people tend to be brand loyal and also generally not fans of Apple. So I think it makes a lot of sense for them to stay out of that racket and leave it to third parties.
What have they done for game developers? Almost nothing it seems. If anything, they've made it harder to reach Apple customers by fragmenting the experience across 3 form factors, with the same 70/30 revenue model. There doesn't seem to be any true rational why you would need an AppleTV, that another cheaper product doesn't do better, or something many people already have doesn't already do.
Microsoft and Sony both sell tablets, phones, desktops and laptops as well as Apple. Of the three who's OS, development tools, deployment and hardware lineup seems most coherent to you?
> ...There doesn't seem to be any true rational why you would need an AppleTV, that another cheaper product doesn't do better, or something many people already have doesn't already do.
I don't think there's ever been a single Apple product ever released that people didn't say the exact same thing about.
It is a real pain to get into the console market.
This was designed to work in conjunction with hardware makers who made game controller shells that housed iPhone / iPod Touch, but with some extra physical buttons.
I always viewed this as laying the groundwork for an Apple TV App Store, but it seemed to instantly lose traction and haven't heard anything about since the couple of months following WWDC 2013.
I assume that API will gain some more steam now.