Has Apple Already Conquered the Game Market?

[bayonetbrant]

http://www.cultofmac.com/162144/why-apple-has-already-pwned-the-gaming-market/

an excerpt

One way to understand Apple's participation in the gaming market is to compare it with Starbucks' in the coffee market.

Before Starbucks, a tiny minority of coffee drinkers in the United States sought out specialty shops that sold premium whole beans and ground their own at home, brewing it with some exotic, imported European coffee contraption. High-quality coffee houses that used premium beans and high-end equipment existed, but they were rare, and exclusively urban.

The vast majority of Americans bought pre-ground commodity coffee in a can and made it using a plastic drip system with a paper filter, or something similar. Or people drank instant coffee. In diners and restaurants, people drank the same kind of lousy, canned coffee made with low-quality brewing equipment.

The serious enthusiasts who sought out premium whole beans, bought grinders and went to coffee houses are akin to the serious console gaming market today.

These gamers are so serious about gaming that they seek out special equipment (Xbox and Playstation consoles, Kinect hardware, game controllers, headsets and so on).

What Starbucks did was not take over the existing "gourmet coffee" market, although that's probably what they initially set out to do. What they did was bring "gourmet coffee" to non-enthusiasts. They got every day people to drive out of their way, wait in line and pay $4 for premium coffee.

Of course, the hard-core coffee snobs think Starbucks is crap. But nobody can argue with the fact that Starbucks rules the retail coffee market.

That's what Apple does with gaming. They're not going after the console gamer. Just as Starbucks got non-gourmet coffee drinkers to drink gourmet coffee, Apple is getting non gamers to play games.

This point was driven home recently while I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, called the Slate Culture Gabfest. The hosts of the show are poetry-reading, granola-baking, lecture-attending East Coast intellectuals. They're not the kind of people who would ever play Call of Duty on Xbox. They feel alienated from the entire gaming world, and didn't grow up playing console games as kids.

Yet they all admitted in a recent show that they've started playing casual games on their iPhones. Apple and the iPhone has turned them into gamers, and turned them into customers of game developers.

This scenario has played out millions of times for millions of people. Apple turns non-gamers into gamers. They've expanded the gaming market in every direction, expanding the age, income and gender barriers that used to exist.

Apple is even being sued by parents because they say Apple makes it too easy for their young children to buy, download and use games from the App Store.

there's more both before and after


discuss!

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

It's in a similar vein to the gushing superlatives the ill-informed media was spewing concerning Facebook a few years back when Farmville and it's ilk got on their radar.

I've got a friend who works as a producer at EA Canada and they were quite excited about expanding into the smart phone market and going after the "casual" gamers and non-gamers.   I guess reality didn't meet the pie-in-the-sky predictions and they're scaled back and farmed out a lot of their future projects.

Who know?  Maybe the tablets will bring about the type of sales that the suits were originally predicting.  All I know is, like Farmville, they aren't the type of games I have any interest in playing. 

[bayonetbrant]

I'd hardly call the Cult of Mac guys "ill-informed media".

You can disagree with their analysis / conclusions, but they're pretty well-informed about the digital world.

[Capn Darwin]

No. Case closed.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Wasn't referring to the artilce.  I was thinking of the twits posing as tech reporters on CNN, FOX, CBC, etc.  You know, the ones who got all up in arms about sex in Mass Effect 2 despite never having actually played or even seen the game.  The ones who make "wacky" jokes about Pac-Man and joysticks and don't realize games have changed since they hung around in the arcade sporting their parachute pants, leg warmers and leather ties.

[Staggerwing]

No. Case closed.

Well, they haven't conquered the Board Game market...


... yet. ;)

[tgb]

 ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

No.

[Keunert]

something like an apple tv with access to itunes, movie and tv program sharing and all ios and osx app running on it... that could be big.

[LongBlade]

No. Case closed.

+1

Although I will say that most folks I know played games before Apple got to them.

My mom, who can hardly be mistaken for a gamer, used to play Bridge with a group of friends a couple of times a month with my dad. She still plays Solitaire on the PC.

So I suspect that most folks play games of some kind, though they don't call themselves "gamers."  Heck, I'd bet World of Warcraft brought in droves of people who would not otherwise be gaming. It almost sucked in my wife when a co-worker nearly get her into it.

[Nefaro]

No. Case closed.

Indeed.

More Apple fanboy posturing.   As if gaming didn't exist before they came up with it?  Buahahah!!

[MIGMaster]

Apple...the "borg-like" culture they espouse bothers me. I can't explain it, but I just have a real inherent, innate, built-in or whatever you want to call it, dislike for Apple products and the whole Apple culture. I'm MIGMaster and I'm a PC, damn it !

[bayonetbrant]

What do you guys think of this line from the article

They're not going after the console gamer. Just as Starbucks got non-gourmet coffee drinkers to drink gourmet coffee, Apple is getting non gamers to play games.

Angry Birds blew up on the iPad.  Suddenly, everyone was looking to download it everywhere.  The only time my wife ever played anything remotely videogame related was Wii Bowling.  Now it's Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, etc, etc - lots of disposable throwaway games, but games nonetheless.  She's even started playing some stuff that's coming in through our Uverse consoles.

I think the point of the article is not that Apple has forced everyone to play Apple games on Apple products.  It's that Apple's infrastructure - instant delivery in your hand - has been copied by everyone, and is now the dominant market model for a HUGE percentage of the games being sold in the market.  Not dollars, but raw counts of games.

Let's face it - most of this crowd are those gourmet coffee drinkers who are capable of brewing a fantastic cup at home with nary a Starbucks in sight.  But Apple's app store casual-game paradigm was never aimed at us.  It was aimed at people like my wife.  And it seems to have worked.

[Jarhead0331]

Are people who play Angry Birds really "gamers"? This sort of begs the question...are apps like Angry Birds really "games"?  To me, apps like Angry Birds are more like diversions, rather than an actual game.  They are something you play while on a train, waiting in a line, sitting at an airport waiting to board your plane.

Most people I know do not go out of there way to play an app in their free time.  When I get a new game like Mass Effect 3, I race home to play it.  Ive never rushed home to grab my itouch and play Angry Birds, or any game app for that matter.

I think real classic style games are part of a totally separate market that caters to a totally separate crowd.  There is a lot of cross-over, but this game market will never be consumed by the game app market created by apple.  I will say that games like Combat Mission touch, are forging new ground and creating  somewhat of a middle road that melds classic gaming with the app game formula. But games like this are relatively new so its uncertain as to how they will turn out in terms of popularity.

[Gusington]

^Big +1 there. It depends on how a 'game' is defined and under which of 100 different categories it fits under.

My 6 year old plays Angry Birds but she is not a gamer, yet.

[MIGMaster]

^ Oh yeah..... just ask Apple  ::)