Just over three years ago, we thought a revolution in gaming was coming.
That's when a startup called Ouya came out of nowhere and raised $8.5 million on Kickstarter with the promise of bringing a video game console that could play Android games on the TV. It was a time when mobile gaming was just entering the mainstream and Ouya appeared to be ahead of the curve by melding traditional console gaming with mobile gaming.
But by the time Ouya launched, the luster was gone. Reviews were horrible, and the company had trouble drumming up enough interest from developers to bring games people wanted to play to the console.
Now, it sounds like Apple is going to take a stab at the same thing Ouya did. And it'll have to offer something unique unless it wants to suffer the same fate.
According to reports from Matthew Panzarino at TechCrunch and Mark Gurman at 9to5Mac, gaming will be a major component of the next Apple TV box, which Apple will formally unveil at its September 9 event in San Francisco.
With the new Apple TV, Apple will be taking on traditional gaming consoles like the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One for the first time. According to Panzarino's report, the new Apple TV remote will have motion controls similar to Nintendo's Wii remote. According to Gurman, it will also support traditional-looking game controllers that connect to the box via BlueTooth. And since the Apple TV is powered by iOS 9, the same operating system for iPhones and iPads, it should be relatively easy for developers to tweak their mobile games and bring them to the Apple TV.
But that gaming initiative puts Apple in a sticky situation. Besides Ouya, Amazon and Google have also tried to bring mobile games to the living room with their respective streaming TV boxes. All of those initiatives have failed. It's tough to convince developers to make games for a new, unproven platform, and so far no one has made a streaming TV box that doubles as a viable gaming device.
(On the other hand, the Xbox and PlayStation 4 make great game consoles that double as viable video streaming devices.)
There are reasons to think it could be different for Apple though. The company has a dedicated community of developers willing to write apps for any new gizmo Apple makes. For example, there were already 1,500 apps for the Apple Watch before the device even launched.
According to another report from Gurman, Apple doesn't plan to launch the new Apple TV until October, which should give developers some time to tweak their games for the new platform. Plus, you can bet Apple has already cherry-picked some game developers to show off what Apple TV games can do during the event next week.
But iOS games are typically aimed at casual gamers, the kind of people who are more likely to play "Candy Crush" on the subway than spend hours exploring the open world in "Grand Theft Auto V." It's not as simple as porting an iPhone game to a TV box. They're two fundamentally different genres. Apple's challenge will be to prove it can bridge the gap between mobile and console gaming.
How does it do that? Your guess is as good as mine.
