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I’m not discounting that there is a huge market for mobile games, but I doubt this idea that it can’t co-exist with traditional consoles. Games like Transistor and Minecraft have a foot in both camps, but looking at every major release out this fall from Metal Gear Solid to Fallout to Black Ops to Destiny to Assassin’s Creed to Tomb Raider to Halo, Apple TV simply cannot play games at that level. And the fact is, Apple TV is miles away from being able to replace a dedicated video game console simply because of the games that are excluded from it. But these type of experiences are meant to be played in small-ish chunks, and putting them up onscreen is a weird formatting change that doesn’t seem like it should inspire some sort of revolutionary market realignment. Your kid can play Angry Birds on an iPad in the car or in between bites of chicken tenders at Applebees. You can pull out your phone and play Clash of Clans on a train or during an awkward lull at a party. Mobile games have found success mostly because they’re just that, mobile. The mere notion that mobile games can or have eclipsed the appeal of traditional games on a TV is baffling to me. Apple’s new gaming partnerships relate to specific popular titles, but they’re far from flinging their entire mobile games library up on the screen at this point. Apple TV is doing even less than the Ouya in many ways, the Kickstarted Android console that brought phone games to the TV. Yet the idea of mobile games moving to television is viewed as some sort of pending extinction event for gaming consoles, despite little evidence that a market for playing mobile games on a TV even exists in a meaningful capacity. And as such, there’s no reason to think they both can’t go on living together in relative harmony. People hear “games” and lump all of them together, from Crossy Road to Metal Gear Solid, but right now the mobile games industry and core games industry are so disparate, there’s practically no crossover between them. This idea that the iOS and Android games stores pose some kind of threat to Xbox One, PS4 or PC gaming, or even that they’re direct competitors, is one that just doesn’t jive with the present reality of the industry. But no matter how many of these headlines I see, I can’t get behind this train of thought.

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