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Apple Snags Former Xbox Exec
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon May 04, 2009 07:24 PM
from the recruiting-games dept.
from the recruiting-games dept.
nandemoari sends along word that Apple has picked up Richard Teversham, a senior Executive from Microsoft's European Xbox operations, ending his 15 years of service to Redmond. Some press accounts assume that Teversham's role may lie in beefing up the games scene on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Forbes goes farther, opining that Apple "appears to be preparing an all-out assault on the handheld gaming market." Other reporting associates the hire with Apple's recent buildout of chip-design expertise.
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Games: Apple Eyeing EA? 151 comments
yerktoader writes "There are rumors that Apple might buy EA, but some interesting counterpoints abound. File this one firmly under 'unconfirmed,' but it's nevertheless a tantalizing rumor. According to Fast Money's Guy Adami, Apple is 'eyeing Electronic Arts as a takeover target.' EA is currently the second-largest games publisher in the world and owner of the smash hit NFL-licensed series of football games. Could we be facing the possibility of an iMadden? Well, probably not. Apple has indeed been bolstering its games know-how, hiring a major Xbox strategist away from Microsoft in recent weeks. And EA is no stranger to Apple platforms: in the last year it's brought several of its major franchises to the iPhone (with more on the way), including Sim City, Tiger Woods, and Spore, with considerable success. But it's a far cry from there to a takeover, and that's putting it mildly. Video games analyst Michael Pachter seems to agree. Speaking to Gamasutra, he pointed out that if Apple was looking to make some entertainment acquisitions, it could buy Warner Music — which controls 20% of the music industry — for roughly half of EA's estimated price."
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remember the atari lynx? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:remember the atari lynx? (Score:5, Funny)
Who let you out of the nursing home.
Parent
Re:remember the atari lynx? (Score:5, Funny)
I award you "Comment of the day".
Go upstairs to your front door and wait for your prize to arrive.
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I'm just glad he doesn't try to talk to me.
Re:remember the atari lynx? (Score:5, Informative)
...and a battery life of about an hour.
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Game Gear was worse (Score:5, Informative)
The Sega GameGear was way worse, that thing would suck 6 AA batteries dry in under 30 mins.
It used to annoy my friend no end when I would be playing my Gameboy every where while he had to be in the vicinity of a power outlet and have to carry the adapter around.
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Re:remember the atari lynx? (Score:5, Funny)
About the same as an iPhone, then?
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Interesting possibilities... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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It's definitely not as glamorous as a PS3, but they're a completely different market.
Re:Interesting possibilities... (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus with the DS, PSP, etc. you can have things like spare batteries.
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Re: (Score:3)
It wouldn't be half as bad if apple would take their heads out of their asses and make a device with user-swappable batteries.
I love the ability to play wolfenstein 3d wherever I go but I also like to be
Let me guess... (Score:2)
This just in.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Hurricane Ballmer hits conference room. Scores of chairs injured and missing.
Maybe Apple will launch an attack on the console market next?! I wouldn't pout it past them, they move so quietly you don't know till it's too late! Imagine a console that is top of the line, but has all the games distributed directly to the console with Apple store, eliminating the retail and the distribution networks.
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Hurricane Ballmer hits conference room. Scores of chairs injured and missing.
Maybe Apple will launch an attack on the console market next?! I wouldn't pout it past them, they move so quietly you don't know till it's too late! Imagine a console that is top of the line, but has all the games distributed directly to the console with Apple store, eliminating the retail and the distribution networks.
For a long time Apple was rumored to have a possible foray into the console market, and that they were developing a "next gen gaming system" or something like that.
They were, just not in the form everyone was thinking. Instead of a console they came out with the iPhone and iTouch.
Since then they have acquired PAsemi, snatched up graphics people from ATI and IBM, and have otherwise been building up a set of high class graphical engineers. Apple has experience designing an ARM chip (an ARM6 I believe), now th
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Already exists, more or less. It's called AppleTV. It's a console in somewhat the same way that the XBox is basically a desktop computer. All that's missing is a controller and a software update allowing game downloads from the App Store.
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You mean like the Xbox? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that at this point in time, Apple releasing a gaming console would make as much brand sense as IBM releasing an IBM branded gaming console.
That's what people said about Microsoft in 2001, and the newcomer's product tied Nintendo GameCube in worldwide hardware sales.
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Re: (Score:2)
Aside from the fucked quality control, xbox is a pretty good product.
Re:This just in.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple makes you program in the painful language of Objective C or some other language that Apple deems as necessary but most programmers cry out in agony.
What's wrong with Objective C? You can mix Objective C and "pure" C / C++ in the same project. Any decent C++ programmer can pick up Objective C / Objective C++ in one day of practice[1]. Obj-C is a superset of C, all of your favorite tricks still work. You can program it on Linux or Cygwin using GnuStep [gnustep.org] and gcc (though admittedly getting it going is kind of a pain). If you really hate it that much, you can get away with writing a pretty thin wrapper of Obj-C to interface to the OSX specific APIs (most of your calls will probably be standard libc calls in C anyway), and have almost all of your code in C/C++. I don't see how it would be an obstacle to anyone.
[1] No True Scotsman would doubt this comment.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you really hate it that much, you can get away with writing a pretty thin wrapper of Obj-C to interface to the OSX specific APIs (most of your calls will probably be standard libc calls in C anyway), and have almost all of your code in C/C++.
While you are wrong about most calls to the OSX APIs being standard C calls (just not true for Cocoa apps) you should be aware that it is not that difficult to call Obj-C code using its conventions from plain old C. It does take a bunch of code but you really don't have to use Obj-C, despite it being easier (as in: less code to write and get right...)
About the only thing that you could theoretically object to about Obj-C (in an "objective" fashion) is the fact that the Obj-C calling convention is slower th
Re:This just in.. (Score:5, Insightful)
What's wrong with Objective-C? How about the fact that it's based on C! How about the amazingly painful object initialization semantics? How about the fact that properties are locked by default? How about the fact that calling a method on a NULL pointer doesn't crash!
I am amazed that anybody thinks highly of this language. Just read the language spec and count the WTFs. I mean, C and C++ at least have the excuse of being around since forever and letting you write almost 100% optimal code. But as you point out, Objective-C doesn't even produce optimal code, and it wouldn't be around at all if Apple hadn't gone down to the cemetery and resurrected its decaying body.
But you don't have to believe me. If Objective-C was so great, it'd be used outside the Apple platform. It's not.
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And this is a fallacy that gets repeated a lot. Just because something is popular (computer language, video tape format, currency, etc.) doesn't mean it's good, or that it's good for you. Things become popular through a combination of factors, and dumb luck seems to be pretty high on the list. There are many cases where the "best" solution loses out to the cheaper solution that's "good enough.
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Generally, in order of preference I'd look at D, C# and then Java as what Objective-C should aspire to. But it'd have to change so radically why bother? If Apple insist on an obscure language with poor toolchain support D at least has the advantage of being a really well designed language, with lots of useful features.
Re:This just in.. (Score:4, Informative)
Forgetting that both iPhone and Mac can be programmed with C/C++ and OpenGL for games...
Oh, you mean like id games:
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/02/25/carmack-quake-live-on-mac-linux-high-on-my-priority-list/ [joystiq.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_engine [wikipedia.org] "Originally developed on NeXT computers"
Or maybe you meant http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/Business/NuclearStrike.html [stepwise.com]
There doesn't seem to be a shortage iPhone games...
Plus, Objective-C and Cocoa are Awesome(tm)
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another possibility (Score:2, Interesting)
With Jobs on the sidelines, we're back to the Sculley era at Apple, where senior executives and high-level techies are hired away from competitors to make a splash in the press and foster buzz around the stealth-mode projects. And incidentally rescue some careers that may have been in trouble.
Too bad that's not what creates great products. Usually what it does is create layers of non-accountability somewhere in the clouds above where the engineers and UI designers work.
Re:another possibility (Score:5, Insightful)
You're talking out of your ass. Jobs is not [macworld.com] on the sidelines. He's too much of a control freak to let Tim Cook or anyone else sabotage the juggernaut he helped to create. If you think Sculley's Apple will make a comeback then you're mistaken and don't know history.
Apple isn't desperate for low-level buzz dealing with obscure hirings. They can leak a single photo or make a "mistake" on the web store and dominate the news cycle for 2 weeks.
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It was implied in the post (which I'm sure was a troll).
Blackberry smartphones are selling more than iPhones because RIM is catering to the enterprise which tends to place orders by thousands. Secondly, Blackberry has more models and is available across different carriers. Third, and most important - iPhone is more than just a smartphone. It's a platfo
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Blackberry smartphones are selling more than iPhones because *snip* Third, and most important - iPhone is more than just a smartphone. It's a platform with which Apple will try to branch out into different markets
Blackberry is outselling the iPhone because the iPhone is a platform Apple will use to get to other markets?
That logic is.... curious.
Stop adoration of exec's, the're human, they fail (Score:2, Insightful)
PLEASE
They don't make a difference, for every 'HOT' exec there are 10's (100's) of other brilliant people capable of doing the same thing.
Articles like this confirm the current executive manager payment scheme (overpayment by SHIT loads) that is one of the factors of the economic crisis
At the same time... (Score:3, Funny)
Cherry-picking. (Score:3, Insightful)
Marketing was one thing Microsoft did very well in the Xbox debacle. If they'd picked up any of the people responsible for quality control, I'd have been worried.
-jcr
Re:Hilarious! The Apple Troll Is Trying To Talk Sh (Score:2)
So, because Apple's previous management dipped a toe in the water, realized their mistake and then terminated the product line, that means that shareholders like myself shouldn't criticize a multi-billion dollar disaster?
You're funny.
-jcr
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What's to rationalize? They put out a product, it didn't sell, they terminated it. They didn't continue down the rathole like MS did.
-jcr
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Apple launched 1 model. Didn't sell well amongst a crowded market and poor marketing and high price tag. It was cancelled after 100,000 models.
MS launches 2 models of the Xbox. Both sell moderately well but at a loss. It takes MS 5 years to make a profit. Also during that time, their last model suffers major quality control issues that causes them $1.79 billion in extra repair charges on top of the $6 billion that they have already spent. Also the small profit disappea
Not so simple Richard this time around (Score:4, Informative)
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They have limited hardware types to consider so it might a smaller job than DirectX.
Come inside the Reality Distortion Field (Score:2)
Now that Richard Teversham is cloaked in the RDF he no longer suffers the taint of Microsoft that many Slashdotters would otherwise sniff out.
Cool! (Score:2)
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Sweet (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought the same thing, plus the following: who cares about either as an end user. "Waaa! These controllers are too similar, I'm always trying to plug the Xbox controller into the PS2 and vice versa!"
What's so bad about similar controller designs? Do you hear people complaining about how the keyboard and mouse for a PC is so similar to the keyboard and mouse for the mac? No, it makes sense that they're going to be similar, convergent evolution, good design is good design.
Too many games made for both systems? Put that another way: there were too few system exclusives for GP. Who the hell LIKES system exclusives besides the console companies themselves?!? "Woo! I don't get to play the game I want on the console I own! Awesome! Consumer choice sucks, hooray for monopolies!"
I think someone has pride in one console or the other. Which is strange, because they're things you buy, not something that should affect your identity. Then again, I don't understand people who have pride in their local sports team, and a lot of people do, so maybe I'm off here...
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And Sony slapped handlebars onto a SNES controller and called it a Playstation controller. But hey, you think that's bad, take a look at all these automakers blatantly plagiarizing the four wheels/two doors design.
Are you fucking high?
Re:Dangerous Moves (Score:4, Interesting)
Unless Apple can come out with a hardware and software solution to the parallel programming crisis
They're working on it. Check out "Grand Central" and "OpenCL".
-jcr
Parent
Re:Meh Assassin's Creed on iPhone vs DS version. (Score:2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPHS8TjQrcc [youtube.com]
Feel free to search Youtube for other iPhone game reviews.
Re:Meh Assassin's Creed on iPhone vs DS version. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, and the DS version sells for 2-3 times the Iphone version. Ever wonder why? And why the consumer is okay with this?
The guy in that video you linked says the Iphone version of the game is better because it is graphically superior and cheaper in cost. He clearly know little about the hand-held market and its history. Every competitor who's ever challenged Nintendo's decades long dominance of the hand-held sector has come at them with the same thing 'better looking' (though not always cheaper games, but usually more expensive hardware) and has been devastated. If the Iphone were only a gaming device it would likely suffer the same fate.
So, you may think $10 for Assassin's Creed on the Iphone is a great deal. Sure. But what if you're the publisher? You might port the game to Iphone after making it for the DS and selling it there for awhile. But what if the DS was gone and Iphone was your primary system, could you afford to sell games at $10 a pop? No. So, publishers are not going to be happy with a $10 price for a game like AC. The only reason the price is so low anyway is because Apple no doubt put pressure on them to lower the price as much as possible, and they did it to test the waters.
Lastly, the graphics are are only marginally better. The battery life is much worse. The control scheme is much worse (Iphone control scheme even takes up screen real-estate!). The durability of the Iphone is worse (no clamshell). And the cost of the Iphone itself it far, far, far higher. Children are not going to be buying it, nor teens, nor parents for children or teens. It costs more than a PS3!
I assert again, Apple has no chance of displacing Nintendo in the hand-held market with the Iphone. It will continue to be at best a secondary market, a throw-away market, while the market-share remains with Nintendo.
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