Apple is getting ready to launch a portable gaming device this year. Many of you already own it. It's called the iPhone.
The Register is running a rumor piece that posits that the iPhone 3G will be announced before WWDC, opening up space in the keynote for Jobs to introduce an entirely new device. This theory is based mostly on reports that inventory of current model iPhones is low. Surely this means that Apple will be announcing the iPhone 3G soon? Think of all the lost sales!
Apple has thought of the lost sales, I'm sure — sales they'll quickly make up next month if they have ample iPhone 3G stock on the shelves waiting to be slurped by shoppers. No one is going to not buy an iPhone today who wouldn't also buy a better model in a month from now (or at least not enough people to matter). Remember, WWDC is less than a month away.
The next part of the rumor follows: What would Apple announce at WWDC that would supplant the announcement of the iPhone 3G? Why a handheld gaming device, of course, since it's an entertainment market in which Apple has only dabbled. Plus, they registered some gaming trademarks in February, so surely...
Gaming is a big part of Apple's future. I said as much right after the SDK launch, as did both game and Mac developers. But there's no way Apple — just getting ready to complete its first year with its most important new product line — is going to cleave the platform in two just for to add a couple of extra buttons and a directional-pad. Anyone who thinks so has missed the sea change happening in gaming over the last few years, as casual games with simplified interfaces have become the dominant form of videogame play for many consumers.
Apple isn't going to try to fight Nintendo. They don't have to, just like Nintendo no longer has to fight Sony or Microsoft in the home console market. Instead, Apple has several million iPhone and iPod Touch customers already, each of whom will be able to download games over the air to their devices. Apple doesn't need to compete with Sony or Nintendo to grab market from them. Apple just needs to sell games to their customers. And I'm sure they're going to sell a ton, if only because it seems like every indie Mac developer out there is working on a game for the iPhone. The first Peggle on the iPhone is going to net its developer a lot of money.*
We're going to hear a lot more about Apple and gaming over the next couple of years, but it'll be the sort of backdoor success that happens when quality games are released on a device with a clever way to purchase them, not some bastard offshoot that's part iPhone, part PSP. Unless your conception of a gaming platform is something other than "a standardized handheld machine which can play games," the iPhone is a more-than-capable gaming device all by itself.
* Or, you know, actual Peggle from PopCap, which is coming.
Oh, think there won’t be innovative games on the iPhone? It’s the first handheld gaming device that has a built-in accelerometer. Think of what you could do with that? RTS games where you control the incline of the playing field. Marble Madness meets Command & Conquer!
Does peggle work on iphone? If the answer is “yes,” it’s a portable gaming machine.
I can think of so many cool games you could make with the touchscreen.
How about an abstract birds-eye tactical wargame where each turn you drag a movement arrow for each unit, and the unit simply tries to do what you tell it to?
Or a bowman-style RPG where you stab a point and the line you draw indicates power and angle.
Inclining the world: populous, but you can etch-a-sketch the entirety of man. Shake the lions into civil streets, and citizens into their dens!
Joel, check out Marble Madness on the accelerometer-equipped Sony Walkman cellphones. It’s not the best implementation of the game (in fact, it’s not much good at all) but the idea it encapsulates is a killer.
I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a sea change, as a split. Gaming is going in two very different directions. In one direction you’ve got highly simplified experiences like the Wii and web games, but in the other you’ve got systems like the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. Mega hits like GTA IV prove that the old way is still more than viable.
On the other hand, there probably is a niche for a bigger iPod Touch with an 800×480 screen, bluetooth, and some rockin’ productivity apps. (Call it Newton 2.0, but not in Steve’s presence.)
They weren’t going to release a bluetooth-augmented iTouch with an HID and tethering last year — it would have eaten the PDA market, for sure, but it would also have cannibalized the iPhone market — but a UMPC-like tablet might work well with a 3G iPhone as a companion product, and there was that giveaway about six months ago about how the iTouch was being seen as the first of a range of mobile internet devices, rather than just as a video iPod.
I so pronounce: maybe.
A Nokia N800-sized device would be weird. Not much bigger than an iPhone/Touch, but big enough not to be pocketable. And if they release a tablet with no keyboard, it would surely run the Touch fork of OS X, not OS X proper. So that seems weird, too.
Plus I question how much more useful a slightly larger, slightly higher resolution screen would really be over the modestly high DPI screen of the iPhone/Touch. If they’d open up Bluetooth enough to allow a proper portable keyboard, I’d be happy with the screen size of the iPhone for most of mobile computing. (Imagine something as thin as the current Apple Wireless Keyboard, but capable of being folded in half. Apple would never do it — too inelegant — but for writers it’d be the balls’ balls.)
That said, I’d put money down on a Mac Tablet over a dedicated Apple gaming platform any day.
Isn’t the Tablet PC market something ridiculous like 6% of the overall laptop market? (Because when you get down to it, outside of certain niches there’s not a hell of a lot you need a portable pen’n’tablet interface for, and it adds a bundle to the cost of the machine.)
A Mac tablet — be it something like the Axiotron Modbook only smaller and lighter, or something like a grown-up iTouch — would be cool, but at the end of the day I’m betting on Apple going where the millions of users are, rather than jumping feet-first into a niche market.
(Also, let’s not overestimate the value of writers as a market. I wish it were otherwise, but …)
I just wish they’d come out with a goddam MacBook Pro with a 19 or 20 in. high res screen. THAT would help it better earn the name “Pro”. 17 inches at 1680×1050 is skimpy for a lot of production work on the go.
#6 posted by Doomstalk
Yes, more than viable if you’re already in the industry. However there was a reason that Mac didn’t release a mobile that looked and worked like any other phone. It’s called competition.
Microsoft and Sony already control the market of the ‘old’ console way.
Nintendo decided to innovate and try something drastically different (yet hardly different at all as far as basic hardware, the Wii is basically a GameCube with Bluetooth and a nifty controller).
Who’s making more money from the games market? Nintendo. 2 products that are much cheaper to produce, much less ‘capable’ than their closest competitors and yet selling much higher.
I’d bet that the iPhone is probably making more money for Mac than any single phone for any other company in the world. Why? Because it’s not like it’s competitors.
Most games for the pod/phone platform seem to be tech demos, really. I don’t see either form factor being very conducive to gaming.
This is just one person’s experience with iPod games, but I found them unplayable.