Link: ‘Huge companies, tiny consoles: The upcoming console war will be micro’
A good editorial from Brian Crecente at Polygon about the rise of the “Micro Console” – cheap, small set-top-box / game consoles that share more internal components in common with a modern smartphone than a PlayStation 4.
Call them set-top streamers or micro-consoles or streaming media devices, the latest entries in this growing market are coming from behemoths like Amazon, Razer and Sony. All three will have their own take on the diminutive devices out this year.
It’s a trend powered by the trifecta of a consumer base growing used to downloading content, the increasing quality of mobile games and a desire to tap into a blossoming market with a relatively low-cost device.
This article provides a nice overview of the recent contenders in the market. But there’s a pretty big elephant in the room when it comes to this topic that went unmentioned. It has already been confirmed that Apple has some of their best engineers on a next-gen Apple TV. Combine that with MFi game controllers, The A7 / A8 chip, Metal, the relatively massive installed base of killer iOS games… the micro-console war hasn’t yet begun.