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Comment by cobychapple | Hacker News Reader

Your comment about controllers made me wonder about the possibility of using iPhones, iPods, and iPads as the controllers for games on ATV. People already play plenty of games using those devices anyway, so why couldn't they be used to control games on something bigger?

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That's a terrible idea for several reasons.

1. As people have mentioned, touchscreens were never designed around gaming. A standard gamepad with buttons and sticks works much better.

2. A big part of living room gaming is local multiplayer, about having your friends and family around you while you play a couple of rounds of Halo or Wii Sports. To support this, controllers must be affordable — common controllers are between $20 and $60 nowadays. You can't support local multiplayer when your controllers cost several hundred dollars.

3. AppleTV should be able to sell to people who don't have an iDevice. Requiring this would mean buying an AppleTV as a serious gaming platform would require, at least, another $199 for an iPod Touch. There are consoles that sell for less than that with a bundled game.

Re. 3: the first iPod required a Mac, cutting the market down. This worked because it enabled a great experience (fast download with firewire). So the issue here is: "Are iPhones as controllers awesome?" IMHO, no (at least, not for gaming as we know it...)

I don't think those would make for good controllers -- there's no tactile feedback so you have to look at it to know what you're doing, in which case you're staring at your phone so why have the tv? I can sort of see it for party games, but that seems like a niche audience for a console.

I can envision a 'dock connector' that wraps around the iphone and provides hardware buttons. No idea what the latency would be on something like that though

I don't think latency would be a problem. But it'd be clunky and not very Apple like, given the simplicity of their hardware and that they've spent years arguing that hardware buttons aren't all that great.

Third party gamepads exist for playing iPhone games on the iPhone (via jailbreak or iCade emulation), but they're not very elegant.

They could, but I'm not convinced that a touchscreen makes nearly as good a games controller as the old sticks-and-buttons.

Controlling something on a flat screen while looking at a different screen puts limits on the number of "buttons" you can have and be able to push reliably. Also, holding an iPhone like a games controller would be uncomfortable over longish periods of time.

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