With Apple being the largest game company by revenue, they do take it seriously, but for every dollar made from an AAA game, there's probably 20-50 to be made on less "hardcore" games. Thusfar, Apple is serious about money rather than capability.
That seems to be changing though as there are pretty strong supply chain rumors that they are working on AR/VR headsets (allegedly delayed due to terrible market conditions and some supply chain issues). They've also made pretty big investments into their subscription game service.
I think Apple TV is very overlooked by developers too.
There's a lot of processing power in those things. The weak 2021 model has 15% more GPU power than a docked switch (30% more than an undocked switch). The older 2017 model uses an X processor which should give it even more GPU power (almost double an undocked switch). The latest A15 model (with a major price drop vs the previous generation) has more GPU power than the Xbox One S and isn't so far off from the PS4.
Nintendo Switch 500 GFLOPS (docked) 390 GFLOPS (portable)
Apple TV (A10x) 770 GFLOPS (2017)
Apple TV (A12) 580 GFLOPS (2021)
Apple TV (A15) 1500 GFLOPS (2022)
Playstation 4 1850 GLOPSS
Xbox One S 1400 GFLOPS
Apple TV shipments since 2017 seem to be in the 50-80M units range. Compared to 25M PS5, 17M Series X/S, 111M Switch, and 117M PS4, that's a pretty significant number.
I looked for a quantitative comparison. If the numbers in [1] are accurate Apple App store gaming revenue was around $11B in 2021. Meanwhile Microsoft was around $15B [2]. That's way closer than I thought, big enough that they could reasonably be concerned about avoiding any appearance of strength that could trigger anti-trust action. Interesting.
Don't use flops as a comparison please. Meaningless numbers especially across platforms. Especially across vendors for those devices that are pushing out said flops. Same thing with texels per second or gigapixels per second or any comparison like that between 3D graphics accelerator devices. If those numbers meant anything then my Intel A750 would be one of the fastest graphics cards in my house right now.
> I think Apple TV is very overlooked by developers too.
Because no one nows if the platform will be there or not. Apple's commitment to it has been lackluster. And since there are no dedicated controllers, you'll need controllers from a system... that you probably already own, so why play on Apple TV?
That seems to be changing though as there are pretty strong supply chain rumors that they are working on AR/VR headsets (allegedly delayed due to terrible market conditions and some supply chain issues). They've also made pretty big investments into their subscription game service.
I think Apple TV is very overlooked by developers too.
There's a lot of processing power in those things. The weak 2021 model has 15% more GPU power than a docked switch (30% more than an undocked switch). The older 2017 model uses an X processor which should give it even more GPU power (almost double an undocked switch). The latest A15 model (with a major price drop vs the previous generation) has more GPU power than the Xbox One S and isn't so far off from the PS4.
Apple TV shipments since 2017 seem to be in the 50-80M units range. Compared to 25M PS5, 17M Series X/S, 111M Switch, and 117M PS4, that's a pretty significant number.