Apple will be releasing new products this week, and there is already some speculation about what will be talked about. A report claims that the next Apple TV will have a greater focus on gaming; and may try to capture casual gamers who are not interested in full sized consoles.
The report comes from sources speaking to the New York Times, who spoke about how the new Apple TV intends to sell the gaming aspect of the device. New components like a more powerful graphics processor and a remote that doubles as a game controller are possible new features of the Apple TV; and there is supposedly a new App Store for buying games on the console.
It isn’t too much of a stretch to see Apple going down this path. A large portion of its mobile App Store revenue comes from games, and it is a logical choice to attempt to replicate the success in the living room. Apple wouldn’t be the first company to try this either. Amazon and NVIDIA are both already attempting to bring mobile gaming to a more traditional environment, although both have had extremely limited success at it.
The new Apple TV could potentially cost around US$150 (about RM650), which would make it substantially cheaper than a console. Although it would technically also suffer the same drawbacks that have held the NVIDIA Shield back, which would mainly be that mobile games are best experienced on a mobile device.
Apple could conceivably come up with games native to the Apple TV, but that would still be a hard sell for a device that is traditionally associated with more passive forms of entertainment. Still, this is new ground for Apple and it will be interesting to see if this nudge towards living room gaming works out for the company.
[Source: The New York Times]
