The next Apple TV will play games.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/09/12/hands-on-apple-tv-2015-with-tvos-apps-remote-featuring-touch-motion-sirihttp://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2015/09/13/ios-dev-why-apple-tv-is-game-over-for-xbox-one-and-ps4/Apple Insider news: "The business model of building relatively expensive game consoles (at $400-600) that are sold for around five years, rarely making a profit but supported by the licensing of quite expensive game titles ($50-80) is likely to implode when exposed to Apple's model of selling a $150-200 device you can replace with a much faster model in two years, while enjoying low cost iOS-style titles from a much wider variety of large and small developers, most of which will likely be sold to work across iOS devices as well as Apple TV, and likely also support gameplay moving from Apple TV to mobile devices.
That's particularly the case when you realize that Apple doesn't have to make significant revenues from Apple TV hardware or tvOS games just to support development of its custom chips and game development tools, because the cost of developing iOS dev tools and A8 processors has already been paid for by mass volume sales of iPhones and iPads. Apple has hundreds of billions of dollars left over.
Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will all have to pay for new chip development in the future, and don't have a massively profitable mobile business to subsidize their gaming operations. When Apple wants to double the processing power of its next Apple TV, it can switch to the A9 paid for by this year's iPhone 6s. That's likely to happen around the time that 4K TV displays begin taking off among consumers, and 4K TV content starts to become available in significant volumes.
That gives Apple a lot of room for growth, which appears likely come directly at the expense of more expensive, monolithic console games like Xbox and Playstation. As consoles get squeezed, higher-end gamers are likely to jump to full PC games (and Apple is also working to make its own Macs more relevant in that market, as well).
Meanwhile, the current crop of games playable on Apple TV are not just basic smartphone titles of the sort that have repeatedly flopped in Android-land (Zeebo, GameStick, Ouya, MOJO, Amazon Fire TV, GamePOP, Nexus Player and other Android TV devices).
The new Apple TV packs more processing power than an iPad Air, but runs at a much lower HDTV resolution (1080p HDTV involves 2M pixels versus a Retina iPad's 3.1M, and Apple TV games can trade off screen resolution to further increase drawing performance). The result is a library of games ranging from console-style first person shooters to iPad-style puzzle games and 2D scrolling adventures."
Those are pretty bold words in the article about Apple taking over the console market. I'm skeptical Apple will sink the big 3 so easily but we'll see.
