Apple prepares for push into gaming market

November 30, 2013 Leave a comment

November 28, 2013 12:51 pm

Apple prepares for push into gaming market

By Tim Bradshaw

While the Xbox One console is delivering Apple-like revolutions to TV viewing, the iPhone maker could yet take on Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony at their own game. At its annual Worldwide Developer Conference this summer, Apple quietly announced a new scheme to allow peripheral makers to create “made for iPhone” games controllers. These joysticks would attach to an iPhone and be used to control a game on the small screen, replacing the touchscreen controls that are often too fiddly for fast-paced games.Logitech’s PowerShell and Moga’s Ace Power both cost around $100 and make an iPhone look a little like a PlayStation Portable or Game Boy. For now, only a minority of the games available on Apple’s App Store are compatible with these controllers but as sales of the peripherals increase, that is likely to change.

Games developers used to complain that Apple was less enthusiastic about promoting them than other kinds of apps or media but many say that has changed over the past year. Some speculate that gaming could play a more central role in any living-room push by Apple, with these controllers just one step in that direction.

However, other technical advancements are still required, analysts say.

“What Apple could release in the next six months is probably not competitive with a console,” says Ben Bajarin, tech analyst at Creative Strategies. Apple can already let people show games from their phone on a TV set through its Apple TV box’s Airplay feature but for now, latency problems – the delay between pressing a “jump” button on the phone and the onscreen character leaping into the air – have limited its appeal. Some WiFi equipment makers are starting to include the 60 GHz frequency that would allow for much faster transfer speeds and lower latency, which could solve this problem.

Apple would also need to improve Game Center, its social gaming hub, to allow for multiplayer matches, Mr Bajarin says.

“This is going to take some time,” he adds, “but some of the pieces are starting to show up.”

Filed under TMT Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

Leave a comment