Apple 'hated videogames'

Apple demonstrated little to no ambition in the games market before the success of iPhone and the App Store. The father of Xbox says it is because the company "hated videogames".

"The victory of games is utterly complete with Apple," Xbox creator Seamus Blackley has told Edge magazine.

"They resisted it as hard as they could, and they couldn't resist it. It's a total victory."

Games support for the Macintosh format has always lagged behind Windows, with Apple seemingly averse to promoting the Mac as a gaming platform out of fear that it would "tarnish" its brand.

The only time Apple made any significant play in the games market was its ill-fated Bandai collaboration called Pippin, a multimedia games console using Mac technology released in 1996.

But now Apple is a major player in the games industry whether it likes it or not, with over 70,000 games currently available for iOS devices such as the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

"They tried real hard to make the iPad about word processing and music, and the audience just doesn't want it," Blackley says. "It's beautiful.

"You don't need to have a games strategy anymore. You need to have a strategy so that your platform isn't disadvantaged in playing games, because gaming is going to be the number one activity on any platform. The highest calling of any digital device is to play a game."

Blackley says the rise of the App Store reminds him of the pioneering days of the video game arcade.

"That era and this era have everything in common," Blackley says. "A game had to succeed or fail for a completely casual audience, with no marketing, based on its attract mode or the first 30 seconds of play.

"If you won, you made 100 million dollars. If you didn't win, you went out of business.

"Those arcade guys understand exactly what's going on now: we're in the era of the new arcade. It's something I'm betting heavily on.

"What's even more fascinating is that 99 cents, with inflation, is pretty much the same as a quarter. It couldn't be more perfect."

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