Image: Apple
Today Apple revealed the newest version of Apple TV, which now gives you access to the iTunes App Store and a neat remote with touch controls.Buzz leading up to the announcement built it up as Apple's big, earnest foray into living room gaming, as if the device would compete directly with heavy hitters like Microsoft's Xbox One and Sony's PlayStation 4. It won't.Any gaming console is primarily defined by its input methods, the controllers that make games interactive. The Wii started a motion control revolution. The joystick in the middle of the Nintendo 64 kicked off the era of 3D gaming on console. And so on.The controller that comes with the Apple TV looks like a very nice way to browse endlessly through Netflix, but it is not fundamentally different than an iPhone, meaning that Apple TV games won't be fundamentally different than iPhone games.It has a glass touchscreen surface, like an iPhone screen, and gyroscopes that detect motion, also like an iPhone.Apple brought two developers on stage to celebrate the Apple TV as the company's new gaming machine.The first was Crossy Road developer Hipster Whale, which demoed…an Apple TV version of Crossy Road. The only difference, aside from the bigger screen, is that the game now has multiplayer, allowing another player to join with an iPhone, iPod, or iPad, which also reinforces the fact that there's no difference between the Apple TV remote and other iOS devices in terms of controls.The second was Beat Sports from Rock Band developer Harmonix. It asks players to swing a baseball bat to a musical beat, deflecting balls back at cute little monsters. You swipe across the touch surface to dodge and swing the remote to swing. Basically, it looks like an iPhone game.At best, gaming is an afterthought on the new Apple TV and its tvOS, as it always is for Apple. At worst, it will make your television a portal into the hellish landscape that is the iTunes App Store.As the $5 billion the iTunes App Store made last year proves, just because gaming is an afterthought for Apple doesn't mean it's not a huge money maker on its platforms. These days, most of that money is being made with sleazy free-to-play games. Even when they're fundamentally fun, free-to-play games are often annoying because they force you to pay or wait to continue playing, when it'd be a lot simpler just to pay a flat fee up front.Apple TV will bring that business model directly into your living room, and you're not going to have an easy time finding the hidden gems. The iTunes App Store gets about 500 new games every day. Sometimes, a game is so good, it makes itself heard (like Crossy Road!) above the noise, but usually, if a game isn't featured by Apple, it's going to get buried.The Apple TV just brings the same problems with mobile games to a bigger screen.
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