It’s official: Apple will be in the home videogame space, starting next month. But can Apple TV make an impact where other microconsoles have failed?

At its event today in San Francisco, Apple announced that the new $149 Apple TV will include an App Store, on which developers can create games via a new operating system called tvOS. It showed some new games that will be on Apple TV when it launches in October, both of which look pretty fun: A multiplayer version of the hit mobile game Crossy Road, and a collection of musical sports mini-games from Harmonix (Rock Band), called Beat Sports.

Launching your casual game platform with a collection of motion-controlled sports mini-games is of course so 2006; it’s exactly what propelled Wii to success and what Sony and Microsoft leaned on for their Move and Kinect devices a few years later. (Of course, the fact that it’s more of a rhythm game than a sports game has me quite intrigued.)

But with competition hotter than ever in the television gaming space, and many other such inexpensive, mobile-based “microconsoles” having not had much of an impact on the market, is there anything Apple can do differently to change that?

Why Microconsoles Could Work

Microconsoles are, theoretically, a cool idea that could change up the big players in TV gaming. While Sony and Microsoft (and, yes, Nintendo, by comparison) pursue high-spec machines, microconsoles go as cheap as possible, relying on the low cost of mobile hardware to produce games that are not really that bad-looking, in a historical sense. It was just 10 years ago that the gap between mobile games and console games looked like this:

Electronic Arts/UbisoftThose are two games released in the year 2005, both embodying the cutting-edge state of the art in their respective worlds: Electronic Arts’ Madden NFL 06 for Java-based phones, and Ubisoft’s King Kong for Xbox 360, looking as good as any console game could aspire to that year.And here’s what console games look like now, for comparison: Warner Bros.Oh, my mistake, that’s actually the mobile version of Mortal Kombat X. Maybe you instantly knew that. There’s still a difference between mobile and console at the high end. But that difference is becoming slimmer and slimmer, and the amount of benefit you’re going to derive from having the absolute best is approaching zero. If that gap has nearly closed within a decade, what will it be like in another 10 years?Still, microconsoles haven’t worked, so far. Good Enough has not been good enough.The microconsole boom, such as it was, kicked off with the Kickstarter for the Ouya in 2012. Something about it must have struck a chord with gamers, as it raised $8.5 million, which makes it to this day the sixth most-funded project in Kickstarter history. But it’s pretty much been downhill since then, culminating in the company’s sale to Razer this year. Razer has a microconsole, the Forge TV. Amazon, of course, has its Fire TV, which may be getting an updated version in the wake of the new Apple TV. There’s a whole laundry list, actually, of Ouyalike microconsoles that you can buy today that are still getting supported with games. They haven’t disappeared, and I’m sure that representatives of each of these organizations are currently composing emails to me to dispute the notion that they are “failures.” But the fact is that nothing has made a dent in the traditional console market yet. Game machines need exclusive killer apps to survive, and so far these microconsoles have generally been surviving off of ports of previously-existing games. Console makers need to solve this chicken-and-egg problem by throwing money at exclusives, whether that’s having an in-house team making great games or funding games from third-party software makers. Fibbage was a fantastic Fire TV game from the makers of You Don’t Know Jack—but it’s not exclusive, anymore. When Apple introduced the App Store on iPhone, it didn’t need to go fund software; it was such a novel and instantly ubiquitous platform that developers just flooded in by the thousands without Apple needing to do much more than say “Uh, you can make games on this, I guess, if you want, whatever.”The missing component in these microconsoles has been exclusive games, or more to the point, exclusive games that introduce some novel way of play. “Worse graphics, but cheaper” is certainly an appealing option for some, but the problem is that there are already plenty of cheaper consoles that play worse-looking games; they’re called used Xbox 360s and you can go buy one at Goodwill today for less than the cost of a Fire TV. Wii wasn’t successful because it had worse graphics and was cheaper, it was successful because it had worse graphics, was cheaper, and had the Wiimote.Apple TV has a Wiimote, too. And I should be clear: I like the Wiimote and I think it was abandoned a little too quickly. Nintendo seemed to really want us to use its new GamePad controller to play Pikmin 3 on the Wii U, for example, but I vastly preferred the Wiimote for pointing.Nobody’s really using motion control very well these days, so Apple pushing that angle might be something of a differentiating factor, leading Apple TV to have some de facto exclusive experiences. And not just exclusive to the Apple family of devices, because why bother with TV if you could play the game on the iPad you already own? Whether they’re buying them outright or just creating a development environment that attracts unique designs, Apple needs exclusive killer apps for Apple TV, or it’ll never change things up in the home gaming world. Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.