News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

March 9, 2007

games

Why I’m skeptical of games on the Apple TV

Posted Mar. 9, ’07, 9:53 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Games

Apple TV gamesEarlier in the week, we ran a piece that argued that the existence of game-related Apple TV strings in iTunes 7.1 were hardly proof positive of games on the Apple TV. We didn’t suggest such a move was impossible; nor did we intend to disprove the theories that games would ever appear for the Apple TV (such a task would be nearly impossible, after all). Rather, we intended to caution anyone taking those strings as the gospel truth—they’re just strings of text, after all. We’re not even talking code here. But some people are always going to see only what they want to see, no matter how flimsy the evidence.

Apple has said flat out that the Apple TV will not play iPod games (look for the small gray text below the “How it Works” diagram). That’s hardly surprising: while the Apple TV probably contains technology sufficient to play games, it’s obviously a different hardware platform than the iPod, so games would no doubt have to be recoded—if nothing else, the control schemes that were designed for the touch-sensitive components of the iPod would have to be redone for the Apple Remote, or a different controller would have to be developed.

Could this change in the future? Nobody knows what the Apple crew might or might not be working on, so absolutely. But the argument, to my mind, for there not being games on the Apple TV has more to do with philosophy than technology. Apple has never proved itself to be a company that “gets” gaming. Last fall, around the time the iPod games were released, I wrote a two-part piece which suggested among other things that the reason Apple and gaming have never gone well together has a lot do with Steve Jobs. Jobs has never shown himself to be enthused about gaming in any form—he’s more interested in using computers to make things like music and movies. And as plenty of pundits smarter than me have pointed out, Apple is at its best when its interests align with Jobs’s passions.


3 Comments

Tedious said:

Right brained vs left brained.

Most PC games fall into the hierarchal "I'm better/faster/smarter/stronger than you" left-brain frag-fests.

The ones that sell, anyway.

What's popular on the Mac? The Sims 2. Before that? Marathon... and Myst.

(World of Warcraft and Second Life are two sides of the same "cross-platform & online" coin, and are a category of their own.)

Mac games will sell when there is something worth playing being sold. "Worth Playing" is in the eye of the beholder, and so far few games have held Mac users right-brained interest.

Those that do are on the Wii.


March 9, 2007 3:02 PM
Bizarro Ballmer said:

Is it silly to assume that your macbook will be able to stream your game of quake to Apple TV so you can display what your playing on your TV?
Wireless mouse and wireless keyboard and there on the ol' 40" LCD is your game?
I don't know enough about streams and speeds or refresh rates to know how stupid this assumption is.

March 10, 2007 8:01 AM
George said:

Tedious: You might want to get off your high-and-mighty "right-brained" Mac superiority fest. I'm actually one of those right-brained Mac users, but I'm sure you'd find that most Mac users follow the averages and are actually left-brained. Speaking as one right-brained Mac user to (presumably) another right-brained Mac user, I think your arguments lack any merit.

The reason why those "left-brain frag-fests" don't sell well on the Mac is because by the time they finally get to the Mac (assuming they ever do), anyone interested in playing them has already done so on the PC (or Xbox or PS2/3).

If Apple were to create a really good game or convince a game company to release a Mac-exclusive really great game, people would be swayed to the Mac especially with the safety provided by Bootcamp to get to Windows.

I bought the original Xbox to play Halo. Good games move hardware. Whatever the hardware, game console or computer.

Sims 1/2 fall into that category of "casual game" that I keep hearing is the "only" area of growth left for games. Utter nonsense. Make a good game and people will buy it. Period. Problem is that for the most part games in general have broken down into just a few categories: First Person Shooters, Real-Time Strategy, Action RPGS, and MMORPG's. What ever happened to combat flight sims? Real RPGs? Adventure games? Sadly all basically dead at this point. That's also partly why the Sims sold is that it was outside the remaining categories of electronic games. Also part of the reason why the Wii is selling because it has brought something new to gaming.

Lastly, as a right-brained, I didn't much care for the Sims so I had no interest in Sims 2. It was generally very tedious and unrealistic. Why does it take my sim an hour just to use the bathroom? Why does their pathfinding abilities suck so much?

March 10, 2007 4:36 PM

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