A good piece about a very good question. I had such hopes for the Apple TV platform as a gaming space. iOS had all the best mobile games. It should have been easy to transition games to a TV experience. But it wasn’t.
The current state of gaming on Apple TV proves that Cue’s prediction was wrong, and in hindsight it’s clear why: While the iPhone’s touch screen provided a new and intuitive way for anyone to play games, the Siri Remote is more cumbersome for games than either a touch screen or a proper game controller.
Developers were deeply hamstrung by Apple on a number of levels, most notable the requirement to support the incredibly simplistic remote as an interface. Add more limited memory allowances and the fact controller makers were not allowed to use the best hardware to make truly great gaming controllers for the platform, and the whole thing faded all too quickly.
I’m not sure how you relaunch gaming for Apple TV without a massive acceptance that they did it wrong the first time and they’ve learned from their mistakes. But it certainly wasn’t that developers weren’t ready to put their games there.
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Seamus runs Byteside. You may also have spotted his words at the Australian Financial Review, the ABC, Junkee, Gamespot, The Esports Observer, CNET, Gizmodo and a few other spots over the years. He's very happy that he gets to nerd out for a living.
