Epic's Mike Capps talks about Epic Citadel and the future of iOS gaming

@Lost

Well. yes... I suppose I am a crazy person!

I do not think AirPlay is the answer for games and apps on the AppleTV.

What Steve demoed was streaming a video from an iPad to AppleTV (He could have streamed music or a photo slideshow).

The key here is streaming. I do not believe you want to play a game on an iDevice and stream the video to the AppleTV.

Rather, you could cross-load (temporary install) the game/app to the AppleTV, run the game/app on the AppleTV, and use the iDevice (or several) as the remote game/app controller.

Each new game/app is cross-loaded (replacing the prior temporary install) to the AppleTV when started.

So all your games reside on an iDevice and/or a Mac or PC running iTunes on your WiFi LAN.

iTunes maintains the whereabouts of all these and syncs its menus with the AppleTV.


I ran a proof-of-concept experiment on my iP4 and the New Epic Citadel game (preview):
-- 00.0 Start the app (tap its icon)
-- 04.0 Logo Appears
-- 05.4 Art components begin being displayed
-- 16.4 Start Button appears (Art component display continues)
-- 25.0 App fully loaded waiting for user.

Because of the way the app displayed progress (while loading) the long start time was hardly noticeable-- not the least bit off-putting.


The Epic Citadel app is 128.2MB.

So, it takes 25 seconds to start the Epic Citadel app on Apple's fastest iDevice!

It took 25-30 seconds to properly install the app in the iP4 using iTunes sync over USB

Theoretically, 802.11n can attain 200 Mbs, 0r 25 MBs.

Over WiFi, the transmission and temporary install of Epic Citadel app could be accomplished in about 6 seconds.

I assume, that the AppleTV can multithread and begin displaying Epic Citadel content as the transmission, temporary install, and load takes place.


If true, you could experience Epic Citadel app on the AppleTV and Big screen, with little noticeable delay-- even though the app was dynamically installed as part of the selection / app-startup process


We may have already witnessed running apps on the AppleTV!

"That's kind of a trippy thought -- that Apple had to finally move away from the Mac to earn a larger foothold in gaming."

Not really. First, Macs are gaining market share steadily but slowly. Gaming has no effect on that, and Apple feels no need to increase their Mac market share just for the sake of gamers. The last thing Steve wants to see is idiot gamers cooling their x-tremely overclocked Mac Pros' CPUs with liquid nitrogen.

And the fact that iPod touch + iPhone are hugely popular gaming devices is a result of their overall good design, not because Apple actively sought to make them great gaming devices. Apple's fancy GUI on iOS does require some graphics horsepower, so excellent gaming just kind of falls out naturally.

So OK, maybe it's just a slightly trippy thought...

"It doesn't take a whole lot of leaps of faith to say, 'Right now, I can display from my iPad to my Apple TV on a big screen TV.' How far away are we from 'that's my game console, and it's displaying wirelessly to my television set?' It's not far away."

Airplay is the key my friend.