Comment by jpxxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpxxx | Hacker News Reader

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If I may repurpose an old comment of mine:

"The console industry used to sell high-end wedding cakes. Now they sell wedding cakes, some sheet cakes, and occasionally a pre-boxed slice if there are leftovers. These are your only options for snacking in the living room. You order a wedding cake, go pick it up in a few days, and hope it tastes good.

They are about to find out what happens when piping hot cookies are hand-delivered in 30 seconds or less to the living room, for free.

The only thing Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have going for them right now is that the iPhone and iPad are drawing away virtually all of Apple's not-inconsiderable attention.

Here's how it will work: Apple will release a $99 controller. It'll look like a SNES controller mated with an iPhone 3GS: 4" standard-resolution multitouch screen, D-pad, four buttons, two shoulder buttons, and a Lightning port. (Inside is NOBODY CARES. gyro, bluetooth, Wifi, iOS SOC, battery.) And, naturally, it will be the least embarrassing looking item in your living room.

You'll take it out of the box, type in your Wifi password, log in to iCloud, and THAT IS IT.

The Apple TV (of which there are millions already installed) leaps into action. All the plumbing is silently set up, the App Store icon appears, a free showpiece game immediately offers to install itself, and Apple connects a half billion users to the television overnight.

Most of the Wii U's best controller ideas are co-opted, the overall controller complexity is a scant third of anyone else's, it retains all the power of touch controls, it requires no complicated setup whatsoever, all the game state is cloud-backed, dozens of touch-resistant game genres suddenly find a home in the lowest-walled garden of any shipping console, customers can add more controllers if desired, and the whole panoply of mobile software can infiltrate the last screen standing.

The Apple TV is a freaking trojan horse, if Apple wants it to be. Nobody else has the UX to stave them off, or the ability to hit the price points Apple can, or their sheer distribution power, or their sheer brand power, or anything.

Free cookies. Not nut-and-raisin filled wedding cakes. Which one is your kid going to reach for?"

> "if Apple wants it to be."

Therein lies the rub.

Apple's had essentially nothing but false-starts toward serious support of traditional gaming. That iOS became and remains a gaming powerhouse is a happy accident that happened more because gaming companies adapted to Apple, rather than Apple making any concessions to the 'needs' of traditional gaming.

Nothing about Apple's potential ability to leverage the AppleTV into a living-room juggernaut is new. You could've (and many have) made the same observation every single year since Apple announced they were going to allow native app development on the iPhone.

Yet Apple continues to ignore this opportunity, I believe, for the same reason they've largely ignored traditional gaming on desktop macs for so long: they don't get gaming. Not as something that's worthwhile in and of itself. And they don't seem to care to. They certainly aren't willing to commit serious effort into addressing gaming-specific concerns.

Popular history has it that Jobs didn't want to do the iPad unless it was good for something other than surfing the internet on the toilet. I'm wondering if Apple's minimum bar for apps on the AppleTV isn't "it has to be good for something other than playing games".

Because they've been capable of putting out a hell of a gaming device for five years. But a good input method for controlling more-general software, on a large screen, several feet away, remains largely unexplored and unclear.

So what if Apple's lack of movement on this front has more to do with their focus being on that unexplored territory, rather than having been too-distracted to release a Wii-knockoff controller and AppleTV SDK?

Given Apple's history, they'd build everything about such a general platform around that input method. [1] And maybe some new dedicated-style of gaming tags along, with devs making brand new games that lend themselves to this input method. [2]

And it would be very unlike Apple to present it the other way around: releasing a traditional games-centric controller, thus requiring non-game apps and users to deal with D-pads and analog sticks.

I think that when Jobs' biographer quoted him as saying he 'finally cracked it', Jobs wasn't talking about their having cracked the video-content problem for AppleTV [3]. He was talking about the input problem for more-general couch computing.

And that's why I think apps and games are almost certainly coming, but a gamepad isn't.

[1] Touch for mobile wasn't just about using taps in place of mouse-clicks; everything about the UI revolved around tactile response. UI panes were dragged out and swiped away. Views were zoomed with (un)pinches and rotated with twists.

[2] Not unlike the way native-touch gaming was forced to spring up, to deliver great experiences on iOS, rather than Apple adding traditional controls to enable the straightforward creation of traditional games.

[3] How to get all the content providers to agree to an iTunes-style, user-friendly, integrated interface; rather than insisting on their silos and cable TV subscriptions.

> Which one is your kid going to reach for?

Call of Duty. Guns 'n graphics, no substitute.

So what you're saying is now Apple can share in on the decline of console gaming market?

What happens when 50 million people plug in an Apple controller that requires little more investment then buying Apple stuff and plugging it in? You get a bubble market of casual shovelware games that destroy the credibility of the entire concept as a serious contender in the industry. You design a LCD (least common denominator) peripheral with LCD UI and LCD functionality so you can have a huge, market that couldn't care less about your product and can't wait to find an exciting risky alternative. Sounds great for quarterly profits though.

Well, we can all agree that the $69.99 title-in-a-box model has reached something like saturation, yes? There's no reason to believe anyone wants to enter this market, least of all Apple which years ago lost the knack for selling software titles at $25+.

I think the future of consoles depends a lot upon how large the exploding Freemium/Recurring models can grow. That pie is growing, and there's no reason to believe it can't work in the living room as well as it does in the pocket.

So my argument is that Apple can have the biggest slice if they want it, and that that slice alone may be worth more than Consoles As We Know Them.

I don't know, COD , Skyrim, Halo etc still seem to be having healthy sales.

I don't see any reason that you couldn't have these titles on an Apple Console though. But it would probably depend on Apple making deals with the developers. I can see EA wanting their AAA titles to be listed on a special shelf away from all of the dross.

Yeah, the AAA franchises are doing great, but they're still part of a stagnant market that's selling into a market that doesn't see the value in what they consume.

Apple would need to spend a fortune in hardware costs just to enable the current expectations of AAA titles, and even then they wouldn't be bringing anything to the table that Sony and MS aren't already.

I think it might run the same risk that I think the OUYA does in that case.

Sony & MS will launch new consoles with some jaw dropping must have launch titles to push sales to "hardcore gamers". At the same time they wait to see which independent Apple/OUYA titles are becoming popular, approach the devs and get ports for their consoles.

As the price for the next gen Sony/MS consoles drop the reasons for buying the other consoles start to shrink because all of the best games are available on the PS4 anyway.

You forget that the mobile gaming market is growing.

At the cost of non-mobile gaming, and since mobile gaming requires several different platforms to support you, it's less profitable and thus will not develop as fast as non-mobile gaming. Just like mobile Apps are a pathetic joke compared to their desktop counterparts.

1. Console gaming usually requires multiple platforms for profitability.

2. It is not true that mobile gaming requires "several different platforms". The iOS platform dominates gaming by far, followed by the Android platform. Targeting the Windows/Blackberry markets is not necessary.

3. Profit margins in mobile games are up to an order of magnitude greater than console gaming margins.

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