High tech

Games on the Apple Watch and Apple TV Have failed

Mobile gaming is huge. Hit game, Angry Birds, recently soared into theaters. As for who’s leading the charge, well, while the Android gaming ecosystem is just fine, Apple’s App Store is arguably the more prestigious mobile gaming marketplace. So, why can’t Apple replicate that success on its other platforms besides iphones and ipads? Let’s start with the Apple Watch. It wasn’t instantaneous, but it didn’t take too long for iPhone game developers to figure out how to apply what they learned to the iPad and its larger screen. The tiny Apple Watch touchscreen called for its own totally new kinds of game design, but a year later the market just hasn’t delivered. Maybe if the Apple Watch was more successful developers would be more motivated to create quality games for it. That doesn’t explain the failure of Apple TV games, though. The Apple TV remote was a cool controller that combined buttons, a touchscreen, and motion sensors, but why was there no official traditional gamepad from Apple? Why did we have to rely on poor third party Bluetooth controllers. Meanwhile, the games themselves didn’t demonstrate the increase in scale and production value you’d expect from a console game, even a casual one. It also lacked the breadth of mobile gaming to mitigate the lack of depth.