They’ve already got Nintendo running scared when it comes to the handheld gaming market, and now some new code in the latest iOS 4.3 Beta 3 firmware indicates that Apple may be planning on doing the same thing to Microsoft and Sony through the $99 AppleTV already in millions of users’ living rooms.
The latest beta of iOS 4.3 indicates that the current generation AppleTV may soon support online gaming, with several references to “ATVGames” and “ATVThunder” pointing towards a gaming controller, Game Center support, online multiplayer and even an AppleTV App Store.
It’s an intriguing prospect. At $99, the AppleTV would certainly give the more expensive likes of the Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 a run for their money, at least if the games were good.
The problem is storage: the AppleTV only comes with 8GB. That’s not enough to store many games meant to be played on a 50-inch television. Perhaps, though, Apple won’t use local storage at all: that 8GB seems to be dedicated for system use, after all.
Instead, if Apple intends to launch games on the AppleTV, it seems likely that they’d stick with the current generation’s streaming motif and take a thin client approach to gaming, a la OnLive. This would allow them to use their North Carolina data super center to stream games in real-time over the internet without needing to deal with the bottlenecks of the AppleTV’s hardware or existing storage.
