It's no secret that Apple Inc. has been on a hardware tear. In the last year alone, there has been a flurry of developments: The company branched into the mobile phone arena with the iPhone. It reinvented the mp3 player with the introduction of the iPod Touch. It worked its way into living rooms with an updated Apple TV.
But Apple is now exploring another hardware technology that has the potential to realign a multibillion dollar industry.
Apple has once again got an itch for gaming.
This isn't necessarily a new frontier. Fans of the Cupertino-based company may recall how a Steve Jobs-less Apple entered the console gaming fray in 1996 with the troubled Pippin. At best, the Pippin ended up being a costly lesson. At worst, it served as a stinging footnote to the company's strained relationship with gamers.
Fast forward to the present -- the company has enjoyed a string of hardware and software hits and has disrupted the music and mobile phone industries soon after entering them. Today's Apple certainly has the means to release another console, but let's face it -- a rehashed Pippin would be a huge gamble, considering the established relationships and competition represented by Sony's PlayStation3, Microsoft's Xbox 360, and the Nintendo Wii.
This doesn't mean that Apple has abandoned ways to break into the gaming market with its desktop hardware. A beefed-up iMac offers an interesting possibility. Adding horsepower to the iMac line isn't exactly new for Cupertino, but with an overclocked Intel CPU and an nVIDIA 8800M GTS under the hood, the new iMac could easily pass for a leading gaming rig -- at least, if there were more developers creating games designed to run on it and OS X.
It seems much more likely that Jobs and Co. may be following a different path to gaming success -- domination of the mobile gaming market.
A trademark extension filed last February with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is one of the strategy's biggest tells. The filing extends Apple's trademark in regards to:
"Toys, games and playthings, namely, hand-held units for playing electronic games; hand-held units for playing video games; stand alone video game machines; electronic games other than those adapted for use with television receivers only; LCD game machines; electronic educational game machines; toys, namely battery-powered computer games."
Skeptics could easily dismiss this as Apple casting a wide net for future expansion, but a swift call to action seems more likely. Not only are executives well aware of the strong interest in gaming among Mac users (and vendors), but also new conditions exist for gaming to be pushed to the forefront in the Apple hardware and software ecosystem. The faltering company behind the Pippin now dominates several hardware segments, which makes a huge difference in launching a new (and potentially related) product. The problems that the Pippin faced – such as the development and marketing costs associated with an unproven device – would be negated by a gaming platform tied into Apple's market-dominating and innovative mobile devices.
Comments
You're smoking crack.
SJ has no (ZERO) interest in games. Yes, 3rd party developers will push them out, but Apple certainly won't ever go out of it's way to try and enter any kind of games market. Mobile or otherwise. Period.
I've seen what Apple's new gaming rig looks like.
In fact... here's a photo of it: http://planetmat.blogspot.com/2008/05/introducing-iwish.html
The gaming industry is a gigantic market, and as the article points out Apple already has an incredible, widely-deployed touch-based platform on which to build games. As far as I know none of the other mobile gaming devices are touch-screen based. This opens up new possibilities for gaming that could be immensely profitable, and so I don't see why pitching a fourth functionality - mobile gaming device - onto to the iPhone's existing three - cell phone, iPod, Internet device - is that much of a stretch to you. Even if it just means aggressively recruiting third party developers to port their already existing mobile games to the iPhone device, and developing a special gaming SDK on top of their iPhone SDK, I could see Apple wanting to increase their already-impressive revenues by tapping into the enormously profitable gaming market through marketing the iPhone as a gaming device...
We've already seen Apple's interest in selling games for the iPod through ITMS. Clearly SJ has some interest in monetizing games and sees the obvious ways in which Apple could revolutionize the gaming market.
"As far as I know none of the other mobile gaming devices are touch-screen based."
Well, you have the nintendo ds as a touch screen gaming device :)
The Pippin was not developed by Apple, but by Bandai, which was a Mac OS licensee. Blaming the Pippin on Apple is like blaming the failure of the WinCE-based Gametrack on Microsoft.
Apple didn't sell the Pippin or support it. Obviously, Bandai didn't sell much of it either. It was too expensive to compete against the cheap PlayStation with its QVGA graphics, and its computer-quality video output didn't look great on a regular TV, pretty much like every other cheap PC appliance designed to be sold as a web browser unit. It was also not really Mac compatible.
But calling it an Apple product, and suggesting that it tainted games is just inaccurate.
Unity Technologies has just announced a partnership with Apple that will allow developers to deploy games built in the Unity 3D engine to the iPhone. The engine can already build games for in-browser play via a browser plug-in, so whether Apple will simply adapt this framework or implement full scale Unity3D support isn't clear.
Unity's an awesome engine, especially for the less technically minded. I've played casual colour matching games right up to immersive FPS's that have been built in the Unity engine. Plus it's cheap for an indie license ($250 I think?).
Check it out here: http://unity3d.com/company/news/iphone-press
Why would anybody think that Apple wouldn't do this. The machines are primed for gaming, developers are needed. What would give anybody the notion that apple wouldn't want more $$ and exposure. Just wait and see my friends...wait and see =]
I guess some people would buy an Apple gaming machine just because it has the Apple logo on it, but us smart folks will still be building more powerful PC's for half the price of an Apple, and buying iPhone clones that are cheaper and better.
It has to be as refreshing as the Wii then!
They might want to look at the whole self build thing as a lot of gamers build their own machines (and over clock the bejeasus out of them). There's not much point in trying to push the Mac as a gaming platform unless its cheap as chips and can be upgraded cheaply & easily by buying parts (new CPU, GPU etc) from whom ever you like, not an Apple approved vendor. The only reason I'm on Win is down to it being the the only real PC gaming platform atm (although MS are doing their best to arse that up with Vista)
@ Ummm, I think that's why the Apple TV getting a major upgrade and/or the iPod/iTouch as a mobile platform are more realistic bets.
Apple would have far more success building out a specific product as a "game machine" than trying to make their computer lineup compete with PCs as game machines. From a strategy standpoint, many people point to Apple's slow but definite PC market share growth as an extension of the iPod's success.
Build a great little "must-have" game machine (now that the iPod sales have slowed and fully saturated the market) and you have a new avenue to promote the brand long-term.
The IPod touch is already a good gaming platform, playing only AJAX games on it's web browser.
When Apple released the iphone client side SDK, they got electronic arts and sega to both produce prototype games, in advance of the release.
For example, here is Monkey Ball:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a6-cUOPoLY
The SDK is well suited for games. It's a bit limited if you want to do other more general purpose applications.
this is a bogus website where are the games? Who invented this website? You need to make more games and entertaining things. You are dum for enventing this website. Erase this website oh and you say that there are games well how do you find them dofus.
haha apple missed the gaming boat by only a few decades, and the iphone will never be a mobile gaming powerhouse. Touchscreen gaming only has so far it can go and will never amount to anything more than gimmick games. The wii has somehow managed to turn its gimmick into a huge success, but people who buy the wii only buy a few of the basic wii games (wii sports, fit etc.), since they are just casual gamers. Its likely that iPhone gamers would also be casual gamers (ie. noobs) and would never buy a significant amount of games each for this to be worth it for Apple, especially because there is no way in hell anyone would ever buy an iPhone primarily because of the gaming. Bottom line - there is very little way Apple can cash in on gaming in a big way.
Sony, on the other hand, could invade the cell phone gaming market imo by creating a PSP2 phone version. They would produce their normal PSP2 that is same size as PSP but with touch screen and better graphics, but they could also produce a smaller version of their new PSP and have that double up as a phone. It would basically be a Sony Ngage but wouldn't look like a piece of crap since Sony is designing it and it actually will have an amazing game and developer library to back it up.
As unlikely as this scenario sounds, it is FAR more likely than Apple ever becoming a force in mobile gaming.
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