The Wii, For Real This Time
A funny thing happened on the way to Apple dominating living room gaming — they failed to release such a device.
Two and a half years ago, I wrote that “The Fall TV Lineup May Include Apple Dominating Gaming” — that was in February of 2013, talking about the fall of 2013. Silly me. I of course meant the fall of 2015. This is Apple, after all.
But my points remain intact.
And this weekend, on the verge of a new Apple TV release — finally — The New York Times is ON IT. Sort of. The (unsurprising) truth is that they’re looking at this head-on. Is the new Apple TV going to destroy the Playstation and the Xbox by focusing on hardcore gaming? Of course not. They’re going to destroy those guys by doing a complete end run around.
The last time a console did that? Nintendo’s Wii in 2006. And guess what happened? They smoked the competition. The problem was that the Wii proved to ultimately be a fad. They focused on the right demographic, with the wrong long-term strategy.
They went after casual gamers — smart — but they went about it the wrong way: with a focus on an input device that wasn’t sustainable. (In a way, Microsoft did the same thing with the Kinect a few years later.) They got the games right but they got the input mechanism wrong. (Will Apple improve this? We’ll see.) It was a gimmick. And a fairly annoying one to boot. The hype faded quickly.
Apple is about to enter the market with the opposite of a fad. By just about all accounts, they now have the most popular gaming device in the world: the iPhone. (And, of course, the second or third or maybe fourth most popular gaming device: the iPad. Not to mention the iPod touch.)
It’s hard to overstate this, yet it feels like this is being under-hyped. Apple is the most popular gaming platform in the world. They’re entering the living room. Look out.
No, they’re not going to kill Call of Duty — from NYT:
Most game executives and analysts see little chance that Apple will be able to woo hard-core fans of the leading high-end game consoles, the Xbox One from Microsoft and the PlayStation 4 from Sony — both of which will most likely still have better graphics than the new Apple TV. Gamers who fancy big-budget games like Call of Duty and Destiny will probably not be easily persuaded to switch systems.
This is the 2015 equivalent of saying the iPhone isn’t going to kill the BlackBerry — it’s true, they’re not! They’re not going after that market; Apple is going after a much larger market. And the key point is whether or not the Xbox and Playstation market will matter in the future? BlackBerry is still hanging on by a thread…
At the same time, the Apple TV is (presumably) going to improve on a yearly basis, just as the iPhone and iPad have. The Xbox and Playstation are due to be upgraded in 4 or 5 or 6 or so years now. Is there any question an Apple TV box will be “up to par” or even far beyond those consoles by then?
The answer is “no.”
To add to this, if you could buy a $149 Apple TV or a $349 Xbox One or a $399 Playstation 4, what do you choose? Today, it may be the latter two. In a year?… What if it’s a $99 Apple TV versus a $299 Xbox One or a $349 PS4?…
And so, my ultimate prediction is that this is going to be death by a thousand slices in Fruit Ninja. The consoles will remain for a decade at the high end — maybe one more cycle. Then the “hardcore” gaming moves solely to PCs (including Macs, by the way). Meanwhile, casual gaming takes over. And I wouldn’t bet against iOS powering that in the living room.
