As we approach a generation of console tablet interfaces and Apple’s long-awaited play on the TV market, are Xbox and PlayStation in danger of being pushed out of our lives entirely? The fat lady hasn’t sung yet, says Patrick Garratt.
I just can’t take the guy seriously. He’s telling me that Apple TV could disrupt the next console generation to such a degree as to render Sony and Microsoft “irrelevant”. He seems excited about the prospect, actually.
“That’s bullshit,” I say. “It’ll cost thousands. The next PlayStations and Xboxes won’t. And what, it’s going to have a controller? Apple’s going to make a games controller?”
“It’s got OnLive built in, apparently,” he sulks. I rant on.
“So it’s going to cost about two grand US and you’ll need a mental internet connection to get a reliable service for playing triple-A. Apple isn’t a games company in the traditional sense in that it doesn’t have a content creation infrastructure like Microsoft and Sony, and it will never have. Apple TV will just be an expensive window on the App Store for people with more money than sense.”
Sometimes I really should think before I speak.
Lessons in disruption
I’ve played video games since I was a small child – I’m going to be 39 this year – and I have never before seen the games industry in such a violent state of change as it is today.
In the past year we’ve all been focusing our attention on the mobile games space as Sony and Nintendo have brought new consoles to market amid scenes of unprecedented disruption. Apple and Android have altered the face of handheld gaming beyond recognition, not so much as applying a little make-up as punching it hard enough to spread its nose from ear to ear. The core games press published countless articles last year on the relevance of of 3DS and Vita, and we’ve seen Nintendo, ostensibly the immovable handheld object, truly humbled with an awkward 3DS launch.
Fortunes have lifted with price-cutting and the arrival of some buzz software, but it’s impossible to argue against the difficulty Nintendo now faces in that market. Vita, too, has no easy prospects with its high initial retail costs and struggles to find balance between “dollar-game” culture and the realities of publishing games like Uncharted. Times have very much changed for mobile gaming.
There’s every indication that we’re about to see the same state of affairs applied to the TV games market.
The next 12 months will be very telling for “games”. We’ve seen mobile gaming endure seismic shifts recently, but we’ve watched from afar. Mobile gaming is not the centre of the games industry. The bluster, money and true attention is always, and has always been, on the TV market.
