Excited about the new Apple TV?

One other thought... if you don't own an Apple TV dev device, and Apple TV isn't out yet, how will you make a game and now that it works well with the controller? Do you just design it for basic iOs-like controls and maybe test it on iOs and then hope it translates? You pretty much have to own an Apple TV to properly test it before launch right?

 

It seems to me that it'd be very hard to come up with a fun game if all we can use is that stupid limited controller. It does have a touch surface but it is another world when compared to a touch screen. With a touch screen you can place you finger directly on the object you want to manipulate. But with that controller's touch surface you'd have move your finger around while watching the corresponding cursor move around on the screen, hoping you can position the cursor on the object without over/undershooting the desired position. A very inaccurate and difficult process. This severely limits the kind of game mechanics that can be used. Maybe only simple clicker type games like Crossy Road can be made.

How can Apple be so stupid. I bet they change their tune.

 

imaginaryhuma There is a new Facebook AppleTV Beta Testers group of people who have ATVs and are willing to test apps.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1501151186844862/1501459756814005/?notif_t=group_comment_reply
So I guess when Unity finally openly supports AppleTV you could build and run your game on the Xcode AppleTV Simulator and then get the Facebook beta testers group to give it the go over. But if the AppleTV comes out before Unity supports it then this is moot.

 

I can definitely say from my experience from the fire tv, that even if Apple didn't mandate it, it's a good idea to have your entire game "playable" with just the remote anyways. The most prudent approach being playable but yet displaying a graphic on the first loading screen mentioning best with mFi controller.

Otherwise you will be leaving out a huge segment of the TVOS public that will never buy a controller (especially if they don't see a tangible need like a game they've played but realize it would be better). I'm sure the prices on TVOS will be higher than IOS on average but they will still on average be much less than consoles and even steam. It wouldn't be viable to have a successful game with the "controller only" crowd unless the asking price would be much higher than what the average will likely be on TVOS.

 

To "properly test" you can't if you aren't in the Unity beta and have a dev kit. That being said the Xcode beta does have the TVOS and remote simulator you can use.

 

It is limiting yes, but less so than the other TV microconsoles (Fire TV, Android TV, etc). While those platforms do allow it to be controller only, it hardly matters looking at the popularity, you almost guarantee being out of relevance if you go that route (minus the Nvidia shield but because of the price your audience is already limited since most pick a different one). From the remote perspective, the Apple TV one is limiting but less so then say the fire tv remote, so there are definitely more possibilities.

 

There definitely have been successful simple-input games. e.g. Rayman Legends on iOs was a one-button platform game which nobody thought could be done... sort of an endless runner experience. You could also argue that less inputs is more elegant and simple is better?

But on the point of iOs touch screens, being able to immediately move your finger to a location that corresponds to a position in the environment is a very efficient random-access kind of activity which is not available on the tv remote. You can't just touch a location and immediately go there. When you look at a lot of iOs games you realize that they rely on this random-access functionality otherwise they'd be almost unplayable. For example plants vs zombies, you gotta be able to touch the zone you want to build on, or indeed most tower defense games. Any kind of games like fruit ninja for example. You just can't do those the same way.

 

Does anybody know if there is a way to get the dev-kit after missing the deadline to sign in as Apple developer?

 

Simple is different, and simple is more accessible. But "better?" I think not. Canabalt is the original single-button endless runner. And it is a great game. But it is a relatively shallow experience. It may be extremely accessible, but it will never have the same level of staying power as other experiences.

The input for the new Apple TV is actually quite a bit more complicated and flexible than just a single button. It's just a matter of building games specifically for that input device. That's the real challenge. Convincing developers to go the extra mile in developing for a device that is atypical.

 

For me, I wouldn't create a game if it was so much designed for the AppleTV remote that it wouldn't make sense and wouldn't be fun on at least one other device, like the iPad.

 

That's a good point about cross-platform... seems like a swipe/touch/click type of interface would translate to most mobile devices. But less so to desktop. I guess every game from now on has to be one-button click affair? lol

 

I would buy an Apple TV if it was easy enough to publish to those other Apple devices because that would save hundreds and eventually thousands, say over an iPad 4 or an iPad Pro. I guess that depends on the controller they offer for the Apple TV.

 

I received the dev kit a week ago. Does anybody know when Unity update with the tvOS support is coming? Im already working on a platformer for tvOS. The new remote is amazing. There are a lot of possibilities for coming up with new input mechanics. Im so excited!

 

So I presume once Unity has a proper integration... we will have to do some kind of `provisioning` thing like with iOs devices, via apple developer site etc, and then somehow we will be able to hook up the appletv to our computers and compile a project and run it on the device in order to test it before we go live onto the apple store? Otherwise it seems it'd be quite difficult to know if the game will work well with the device.... presumably this is what their usb port is for? How are developers getting their game onto the device to test it with the dev kit at the moment?

 

TestFlight is pretty standard for all Apple devices.

 

You build to It just like a phone/pad.

 

TestFlight?

 

For deploying builds. Used to be a third party app that also supported android. Bought by Apple and integrated into dev tools/environment.

https://developer.apple.com/testflight/

 

If you have more than 1 tester I would highly recommend TestFlight. However, what you mentioned around provisioning and testing via USB is still there just like the phones if you are a solo tester and don't want to use it.

 

ok cool. Anyone any feedback on the hardware performance of the new Apple Tv?

 

Some lucky developers can register interest in development devices, but for some strange reason only in every surrounding country but mine

 

You can already buy the device so it doesn't matter anymore

 

Just bought me an Apple TV :-D

Now just have to figure out what kind of a game will suit the controller.

 

There are a few 'one button' games in there. The slot racers are great. SlotZ and Pico Rally.

 

http://toucharcade.com/2015/10/30/new-apple-tv-first-impressions/

This confirm what I thought about the design of the remote as a gaming controller : IT SUCK, it suck very bad.
And to think it would have taken very little to improve it.

 

I suppose you could say it sucks compared to something else, and it seems Apple themselves have said (in the documentation) that it is not the most ideally suited to gaming, but that just means there's a new set of rules to wrangle to make it excellent. There are some games that can absolutely rock with that controller, so you just have to shift focus away from 'I can make whatever I want' to 'I can make the perfect game for this device'.

This said the control device does bother me, it presents some challenges when the type of game you want to do doesn't quite work ideally with it. You can get around some of the issues by having a clever interpretation of the input in software, though.

 

It is not the Siri controller that is the problem, it's Apple's insistence that all ATV games support it

 

Apple TV?

nope.

Then again I dont have a TV I use my computers to watch Hulu, Netflix and Youtube and I have been doing that for about 8 years now

 

I think by years end there will be a few titles that are worth playing. It's definitely a unique control scheme so you can't necessarily tailor an existing game towards the platform you have to think of a game with that in mind.

 

Ok so I got my AppleTV yesterday, so here's a few initial observations/reviews.

Overall it's very sleek and very well designed. Lots of polish on the hardware and software. Quite heavy for a little box. The hardware is far more performant than an Ouya and is shaping up to be everything Ouya was trying to be and more.

It's clear that various Apple technologies were put in place first before this new device, such as Music, iTunes movies/tv/music, app store functionality etc. It just wasn't 'time' to converge all of these into a new device until now, and it's maybe still a little early.

Navigation is pretty good. There is definitely a slight sense of disconnect between how `much` you swipe on the remote to move the cursor etc and how much it moves on screen. There's some guessing involved in how much of a swipe is needed to move a certain distance, e.g. when entering an apple id or something and trying to figure out how to get to a specific character. Probably with time it would be more of a learned response. The remote does have a push-to-click button under the trackpad thing. Works fine. My only slight gripe is it's a little bit louder than it needs to be. I played a few games with the tilt controls, I wasn't very good at it, maybe the controls were too sensitive or something or I'm just not that good at it.

In terms of tv apps there's quite a few, obviously not everything. Nice to have netflix and youtube and vimeo and itunes and various others like ABC/NBC/FOX etc. The content in the 'tv shows and movies' department is quite impressive. Everything loads and runs fast and responsive. It doesn't take forever to download images and previews like Ouya did. Overall Apple's interface is highly polished and works well.

Then there's the app store. Well ok... so it's a new platform. Right now, there's maybe 10-15 high-quality games, and the rest are quick ports from iOs that are mostly very ameteur. A problem Ouya had was it couldn't attract bigger games or companies. There are some well-known games present like Crossy Road (100,000,000 downloads), Aslphalt 8 racing, Transistor, some space games, Rayman etc. But most people will recognize most of these have been on iOs devices already. Partly this is okay because if you bought on iOs in some cases that means you can already 'own' it on AppleTV and download it right away, IF it's on there and not as a 'tv version' which has a separate pricetag. At the same time, there is a lot on iOs devices which are not on AppleTV. It had only a tiny handful of my iOs purchases available for download. It's interesting that apple has built a wall between iOs and tvOS on purpose, rather than simple migrate millions of apps on day one. Maybe because many of them just don't suite the control scheme or big screen. But tools like Unity help with portability I guess.

The games that are good, are really good. I mean, the hardware is no slouch and viewing on a decent-sized tv screen is visually awesome all by itself (32" here). Graphics are high quality and of an XBOX360 or Playstation 3 kind of quality. Framerates mostly are 60fps and smooth. All of them run at 1080p. I'm not quite sure how memory is managed in terms of how the system uses memory for graphics, like a shared memory architecture like on iOs... but in that regard it's a little bit like Playstation 4 possibly in that you have quite a large 2gb of ram of which you could potentially use quite a lot of that for textures and stuff. The better games definitely did not look like some crappy polygonized Playstation 1 kind of things... instead they looked very attractive and arcade-like. I'm quite impressed with the performance. Apparently the A8 chip has around a 5 gigatexel/second fill rate which is useful, and more than 10x the porformance of Ouya.

At the moment there are significant limits on the number of decent games available. I think Apple should've worked with a much larger number of highly popular game studios to bring a lot more high-quality games as launch titles. There is no angry birds for example. With maybe 50-100 of the best iOs games it could've started out much stronger. So right now besides the few decent games that are a) somewhat hard to find and b) have a higher price tag in the 4.99-9.99 range), the other 90% or so are not greatly appealing. Clearly a bunch of iOs folks have jumped on the bandwagon with their shovelware hoping to make some money. There are also definitely many such games stuck in an iOs mindset with low pricetags. I hope it doesn't result in a major race to the bottom and free-to-play madness, I'd rather see 4.99-9.99 remain the main pricepoint. We'll see how it evolves. Being dominated largely by all the crap games though it kind of degrades the experience at the moment. It's going to take a bit of time for the platform to mature. That said, Apple is so strong, what they do have in place is very well implemented, such that it forms a solid foundation.

I think one of the biggest points about AppleTV is that is has the app store. Unlike the rather difficult-to-approach other game consoles that are much more closed, the open ecosystem is going to give AppleTV a far bigger catalog of games eventually. It's just as easy for an indie to get on there as a big studio. That's a major point. That, coupled with the `pretty decent` hardware, makes for a lot of POTENTIAL. I think Apple has solved everything that was annoying and wrong with Ouya etc and has gone far beyond it in some areas. It just needs a lot more quality apps to really make it have a stronger presence - the limited catalog at the moment comes across as not a main focus and it should really be the main focus. It will, I guess. And then there's the several stupid flappy-bird clones which already dominate the alphabetically-searched 'F' page, lol .. and then there's the several 'fireplaces'. Do people not have any imagination?

The remote.... hmm. Nicely designed. Easy to use. Lightweight. Does not feel substantial when you're using it as an action-game controller... racing is okay with the tilting etc but it's kind of like tilting a pencil. Rayman's control system I have yet to get used to, it's a bit alien, and they could've done better with it. It seems you can click on certain 'sides' of the touch surface and it'll sort of override any supposed interpretation of 'swiping' and instead do a d-pad style input, which is sort of useful. Definitely you can tell how the remote is not well suited to typical gaming, though. It's definitely a hurdle. A user interface device should disappear and be intuitive. Sometimes the siri remote is awkward, but that's also down to the game not being well suited or interpreting the controls well. I bet that there will be at least a few months of a big shovelware avalanche while some of those games will be decent, and then gradually people will start coming on board and developing for `TV first`, and then AppleTV will start to forge a name for itself on its own merits as a unique platform. Right now the link to iOs assets seems like just a cheap way to port a back-catalog, and even then not very much of it has ported yet... but that's not a way to move forward and innovate. Where are the exclusive launch titles and really awesome games? I'm not sure I saw even a single first-person game in the entire catalog, for example, and what AppleTV really needs (and has potential for) is for some bigger companies to innovate and come out with some really awesome higher-end console-challenging games. And yet the potential is there to do a lot of very interesting things with the device. Indies and smaller teams should jump on it and eventually the bigger ones will follow.

Overall pretty impressed. I would like to see a lot more quality games, and for people to start developing FOR it instead of just shoveling stuff. It has a tonne of potential but so far it seems to mostly be featuring content from 'elsewhere' and it really needs to forge its own identity as a gaming platform. With Apple not really branding it as a 'game console' I don' think that helps either. But in terms of 'can I do xyz' with the hardware, is the performance there, can we make really good games for it with really good graphics... yes. And everything downloads/installs/runs fast. It has all the pieces in place to be a great platform, but it's kind of also like it was just born, and the content needs to grow up somewhat. Once it has some titles on it that are really awesome and are really `made for TV` I think it will take off like a rocket.

Its an Apple device, and I'm sure they will add features and content and more polish as time goes on. The future looks bright.

 

I notice still there is a distinct lack of new apps entering the appletv app store over time... I guess it's kind of early and many people are still working on stuff. BUT what also occurred to me is that because Unity is such a huge player in the mobile etc app industry, not having Apple TV as a build target yet is holding back a LOT of apps and games. I think what I'm experiencing is `Unity withdrawal`, lol .... looking forward to when Unity gets the AppleTV target working well and supporting the various oddities of AppleTV development in an easy way.... I think then (before year end) we'll suddenly see a huge influx of cross-platform games, and maybe some new stuff, starting to show up on the store. It seems early days yet but still a lot of potential. I also like how some people are returning to gaming/arcade roots given `TV` is where a lot of this all started.

I'm working on my first AppleTV game, a TV exclusive of sorts, although aiming to release on Mac/Windows/iPad also. Chomping at the bit to get it running on the device and test some performance etc. Any ETA on the release date Unity?

 

If you have pro you can ask to be part of the beta.

 

Alas

I see apple added 3 new games yesterday... guitar hero was one of them. Skylanders is another - extremely long downloads, huge amounts of `filler` footage and scenes and non-gameplay garbage, and poor gameplay. And I forget what the other one was. Good to see some action in terms of the marketplace expanding with some higher quality games though.

 

Looks like December 8th will bring Unity 5.3, including Apple TV support. yay... The AppleTV store is noticeably somewhat slow at adding new games right now but as soon as this hits, I bet we will start seeing a tidal wave of ports and new game releases. Should be exciting.

 

It's been in the 5.3 roadmap for a month or more but it's marked as at risk and still not part of the 5.3 release candidates. Could be that it won't be part of it and might come later.

 

That would somewhat suck. I thought Unity said in a blog etc it was coming this year.

 

It's in open beta now instead of closed beta (so if you have pro you can try it out).

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/official-unity-for-apple-tv-open-beta.371324/

 

sadly apple tv seem to be difficult to reach if it s part of your business model
http://toucharcade.com/2015/12/07/apple-tv-app-store-games-making-100-dollars-a-day/

 

Since it's an item that is normally a gift as part of the holiday season, I wouldn't worry too much. We'll have to wait and see what sales are like at the beginning of next year.

I will say that the Fire TV has made a decent amount of revenue, and I would expect the Apple TV to do the same once they've sold enough units.

 

Hm. Yes the article has some points. It IS worrying to see hardly any updates on the store. I check it most days and maybe here or there is one or two changes, and then a bunch of days with no discernable difference. Movies and TV shows update more often than apps. The featured apps and special selections of apps are mostly the same for weeks at a time. It is honestly starting to worry me. I know part of it is portability - the likes of Unity not being able to build for Apple TV in a mainstream way yet means a significant backlog of possible ports sitting waiting to appear. And since there wasn't a whole lot of certain information on Apple TV before launch many people probably haven't spent much time committing to it. I would hope to see at least several new, good games, every day. At present there aren't many games you can't find elsewhere and most of the better games are ports. I'm not surprised 80% of the stuff is making next to no money because it's generally crap shovelware.

I really hope it picks up more. There ARE a lot of people owning the first AppleTV so let's hope they have an incentive to upgrade. And it does seem to be early days. Give it at least a few more months and hopefully we'll see it take off more. Apple must get behind it and market it, not let it just be some 'box' that is like an accessory that nobody cares about. The marketing really needs to put is as a game/app platform. Does anyone really want the TV part, which is mostly channels that you have to have a cable subscription for anyway.

I do expect more units sold in black friday/cyber week and pre-christmas. Hopefully that gives a boost. But really I think lots of develoeprs are waiting on the sidelines watching and hoping to see what happens before diving in. If enough people commit then the crowd will follow.

 

Fire TV doesn't require you to have support for a weird (at least for games that is) controller though

 

I have a game that was on the fire tv, and have spent a couple of months making an input asset for the apple tv that is in my signature, so I've spent quite a bit of time with both controllers for input. Obviously, in both cases a controller (mFi on apple or bluetooth on fire tv) is superior.

That being said for most game types the apple tv siri remote is better than the fire tv voice remote. Button wise they are pretty much the same a couple of buttons for your actions (shoot, jump, etc). The difference is in the navigation. The fire tv has the circle style dpad which is ok for simple games like crossy road, but you are not going to use it for anything more complex. It isn't even a particularly good dpad you can't navigate diagonally well (try hitting up and left at the same time and you will fail more than half of the time). It mainly is for up/down/left/right navigation only. The apple tv instead has the touchpad with around a 800 x 800 resolution. If utilized well it will be able to service more games than the corresponding Fire TV one. It can be used like a dpad if you want, or a mouse cursor, or a swipe style interface. This obviously doesn't fit every game, but it fits more games than the Fire TV remote. Add to that, the accelerometer/gyro and it is clearly better than the other TV remotes (not controllers).

I will say that Apple dropped the ball a bit on the API for it though. They basically left it at a very low level, so most of the interfaces current developers have tried are awkward. Having a high level API (with configurable dead spots, quick clicks, double clicks, long presses, dpad, swipes, etc) should help many and is why I wrote https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/49843 .

 

Thanks for letting us know about your controller asset, looks very useful.

 

Hey, just watched the first/new Apple TV tv commercial on primetime television. About time!

http://www.macrumors.com/2015/12/08/apple-ad-the-future-of-television/

Also as of 2013, Apple TV first gen had sold more than 28 million units, which is nothing to shake a stick at (nore sure what the current number is)... http://appleinsider.com/articles/14...2013-becoming-apples-fastest-growing-hardware

Also if you look at how many units of previous generation Apple TV's were sold, there were at least several million units sold with each upgrade. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_TV

No real reason to believe 4th gen would sell less, I expect to sell far more because of the greatly expanded functionality.

 

Desktop gamers look down on laptop gamers. Pc gamers look down on console gamers. Pc and console gamers look down on mobile gamers. Will mobile gamers look down on tvOS gamers?

 

Haha. I don't know about looking down, but I feel even Apple doesn't take it too seriously as a gaming platform.

 

Well unity does, because it's a platform in the 5.3 update ._.

Webkit is gone too so unity will actually be a decent option for people who don't want to get a mac for xcode and uikit.

 

im not seing apple tv plateform on 5.3 is it bundled with "IOS" ?

 

(Unity also added flash as a platform, at the end of flash's lifecycle no less, soo... )

 

the apple tv support apparently isn't coming until a very soon patch update?