Last year Phil Harrison, former president of Sony Computer Entertainment’s Worldwide Studios, said that the growth rate of Apple’s ecosystem is so large that in a decade’s time there’s a chance Apple may “own” the gaming industry, as noted by “AppleHeadlines” (http://macte.ch/QvCZv).
“At this trajectory, if you extrapolate the market-share gains that they are making, forward for 10 years — if they carry on unrestrained in their growth, then there’s a pretty good chance that Apple will be the games industry,” he said. “… The fact that the consumer purchase and discovery mechanism is so well integrated – you see something on the App Store, you click a button, the product delivers to your device. That end-to-end shopping experience, if you want to call it that, has been so elegantly built by Apple and they will continue to refine it … I think the future for the dedicated console as it is currently constructed, from chips and hard drives that you buy once and games that you buy at $60 or £40 a time; that business model is almost at the end of its life.”
I think Harrison may be onto something, though I don’t think that Apple will enter the game console market, as some predict. Instead Apple will “own” the gaming market with inexpensive, downloadable apps that are increasingly more powerful and capable as the power of the iPad and other iOS devices increases.
Imagine, if you will, an iPad with HD graphics connected to an HDTV (perhaps one of the Apple branded ones some pundits are predicting). Or imagine my tweaked GameDock concept (see http://macte.ch/MW82E) finally coming to fruition.
— Dennis Sellers
