Part of Apple's historic MO has been to not invest in areas they don't see themselves having a competitive advantage in. Now that they can make gaming happen with a very low wattage budget they may well try to enter that space in earnest.
The Studio is a more compact form factor than any modern 4K gaming console. If they chose to ship something in that form factor with tvOS, HDMI, and an M1 Max/Ultra, it would be a very competitive console on the market — if game developers could be persuaded to implement for it.
How would it compare to the Xbox Series X and PS5? That’s a comparison I expect to see someday at WWDC, once they’re ready. And once a game is ported to Metal on any Apple silicon OS, it’s a simple exercise to port it to all the rest; macOS, tvOS, ipadOS, and (someday, presumably) vrOS.
Is today’s announcement enough to compel large developers like EA and Bungie to port their games to Metal? I don’t know. But Apple has two advantage with their hardware that Windows can’t counter: the ability to boot into a signed/sealed OS (including macOS!), load a signed/sealed app, attest this cryptographically to a server, and lock out other programs from reading with a game’s memory or display. This would end software-only online cheating in a way that PCs can’t compete with today. This would also reduce the number of GPUs necessary to support to one, Apple Metal 2, which drastically decreases the complexity of testing and deployment of game code.
I look forward to Apple deciding to play ball with gaming someday.
They could always choose to remedy that with a generous buyout offer.
Also, might be cheaper a couple years down the line.
They also don't need the display, camera, microphone. And could sell it at a loss and make the margins with TV+ and game sales.
But they would need their own bundled controller/accessories and get serious about AAA gaming.
Edit: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/01/pluto... says
> Microsoft already used Pluton to secure Xbox Ones and Azure Sphere microcontrollers against attacks that involve people with physical access opening device cases and performing hardware hacks that bypass security protections. Such hacks are usually carried out by device owners who want to run unauthorized games or programs for cheating.
So initially you could have Pluton-only servers and down the line non-Pluton hardware will simply be obsolete.
They won't have the Ultra GPU, but Apple's been shipping for years and Microsoft is just now bringing Pluton to market. I do wish them luck, but that's a lot of PC gamer hardware to depreciate.
I wish.
But playing ball is more than hardware. It is spending billions to buy Activision or Bungie. And I can't honestly imagine Apple having the cultural DNA or leader aspiration to make a game like The Last of Us where the player is brutally beating zombies to bloody clumps.
In video games the business side demands having exclusives, or timed exclusives, to sponsor twitch streamers playing your game and cutting special deals with studios. This is very different to the App store where Apple emphasizes their role as a neutral arbiter and a dev having the same deal as any other dev. Can you imagine the complains here on hn if Epic Games would get a a special deal just because they are a bigger fish and Fortnite is popular?
I could definitely see the Max and Ultra with a beefier cooling system (like the Studio’s) having pretty respectable performance.
M1 Max struggles to keep up with an RTX 3060 mobile.
Now that's with the overhead of Rosetta 2 and all that, so it's of course "not fair" for the M1. But that's also the current reality of the market, so ya know.
So publishers/developers need to make more native games. Even though every Mac port will probably make 1/10th revenue of a Windows title I guess Mac users would be happy to pay more for better games. I certainly would.
In the PC space the average spend is $800 and a PS5 is $500.
Yet the iOS 'gaming' scene, despite being one of the major revenue drivers, consists mostly of low-quality F2P games.
In any case, it's a moot point. Apple clearly doesn't care about desktop gaming and it shows in both their hardware and software.