The Next Big Thing is in Your Pocket

Will the next big gaming console be your phone? Epic Games president Mike Capps is betting on iPhone 8 just a few years from now:

It’s about how do we deal with iPhone 8… if you watch where the gamers are going that’s where they are. Your iPhone 8 will probably plug into your TV, or better yet, wirelessly connect to your television set to give you that big screen gaming experience with good sound. So really, what’s the point of those next-gen consoles? It’s a very interesting situation to be looking at. That’s what we’re starting to think about more… not how do we scale from some Nintendo platform to some other future console.

That’s courtesy of Christian Zibreg, who adds:

Many people think Apple should launch a dedicated gaming console. Frankly, Apple may not even need a dedicated gaming hardware. iPad 2 and iPhone 4 already have capable GPUs that will only get better when the A6 chip comes out (some say it’s in test production now). The AirPlay technology can already wirelessly beam some games from your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad to the big screen TV. And if Apple ever makes that rumored television set, they will have in place an end-to-end entertainment system, most likely cloud-based, that will be second to none. How do you rival that with a dedicated gaming hardware and decades-old business model that boils down to overpriced games distributed (mostly) exclusively on physical media?

I’d add Google in there, too, since Android has taken such a huge chunk of the smartphone market, and will probably — eventually, someday — do the same in tablets. Now they just need to figure out an app store model that works as well as Apple’s, and gets similar amounts of cash into the hands of developers.

But I’m not much of a gamer, and the few games I do sometimes play are almost all historical strategy titles from Strategy First — which don’t lend themselves at all to anything but a desktop computer. But the business of console games is fascinating, especially given that Apple and Google are poised to knock the legs out from under Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.