Did Apple announce its entry into the video game 'console wars' along with the iPad launch?

I haven’t heard much about this. Care to share a link regarding this announcement?

I’ve never heard anything about Apple producing a video game console.

If we’re going to consider the iPad/iPhone/iPod brand as a valid competitor to the big three console producers, then we might as well throw in every cell phone ever made. Until Apple produces and iBox or something, they are not directly competing with Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo.

The iPad is a viable gaming platform, but any gaming function of the device is an added bonus. It is not a gaming device and will not compete any more directly with the big three than the common cell phone.

I call April fools on this one. Nice try though. :-P

That’s not gonna happen at this given time. There already are three well established consoles, and it’s been proven for that past 20 years that a fouth console has little chance to make it in the gaming industry right in the middle of an on going console war no matter that Saturn kicked total ass.

You never know though…still, I’ve heard of no such annoucement, it would be very odd if this was true.

@Symbeline You know, I’ve never actually noticed how the fourth console always gets the boot. Sega threw the towel in on the Dreamcast after Microsoft, the newcomer in the market, had released the Xbox. Virtually every time the market has had more than three players, a fourth has been knocked out, even if that fourth is a well established name like Sega. Interesting market dynamic.

It’s especially ironic considering that the Dreamcast was cheaper and had a better game collection than the Xbox, which really only had one flagship title for about a year. PlayStation 2 won that generation of console wars by a long shot, yet feature-wise and graphics-wise it was the weakest of the bunch, although it had a very large game collection.

In the current generation, the Wii has had the worst game selection of any console and by far is the most computationally unimpressive console, yet its appeal is universal.

@noyesa It’s true…consoles like the Dreamcast, NeoGeo or Saturn were superior to the ones that remained in the race. The problem with that is, I think, is because they cost so much to put together, and while most of their games were choice games, there wasn’t enough to support the console aside from distinct fans, and well, contrary to what many believe about gaming, fans don’t support the entire industry. Things like Nintendo or PS2 have something for everyone, so it wins merely by reaching out to way more people than the other consoles did. :/

@Symbeline another HUGE problem for the dreamcast was no copyright protection. Anyone could simply rip games for a dreamcast without any kind of modding. This made developers not want to make games for sega in fear of having them stolen.

@Symbeline Game collection has a huge part of it, though. Virtually all consoles are sold at a lost for a significant portion of their lifespan. The Xbox 360 hardware only became profitable in (if I remember correctly) late 2008, 3 years after it was released. The profit margins come mostly from software sales. However, the portable gaming market is generally a higher margin than consoles (which have to be cutting edge).

Computer hardware improves at a very rapid rate. The Xbox 360 release was the first in recent memory in which a gaming console outpaced anything available on PC. The GPU was a generation ahead of anything on the PC and the CPU was no joke, either. It was faster than an, at the time, top of the line gaming PC, which would have run in excess of $1000 (barring unnecessary amounts of RAM or SLI GPUs), all in a portable little box for $300. That’s the price point of the market, and the console manufacturers have to keep it around here to push these devices into households.

If my memory serves me, the Xbox 360 was initially being sold at a $200 loss (PlayStation 3 was much worse to that end). Microsoft profited something like $25 per title sold, so gamers had to buy a pile of games in order to bring in a profit for the company. The average attach rate was only ~3.5 titles, which in some cases brought in a profit. However, die hard fans will often own more than enough to bring in a profit, enough to almost bring the console to equilibrium, although the Xbox division operated in the red for a long time after the 360 release. Once the 360 hardware became profitable to produce, combined with game profits, the Xbox division of Microsoft actually started grossing profits for the first time since it was started in the late 90s.

Since the industry does and always has worked this way, it’s no shocker than Microsoft stayed in and Sega gave up—Microsoft has deep enough pockets to run the Xbox division in the red… forever, pretty much. The company’s other products are a cash cow with insane profit margins. Sega and Nintendo have no such luxury.