Apple is Headhunting Gaming Executives

By  |  Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 9:31 pm

The evidence keeps coming that Apple is getting serious about gaming. In just the past week, the company has hired a senior Xbox executive from Microsoft, and earlier this week, a graphics expert from ATI. Apple’s headhunting follows its investment in a graphics chip maker in December.

Today, Gizmodo reported that Apple now employs Richard Teversham, the former senior European director of business, insights and strategy for the Xbox. Bob Drebin, CTO of AMD’s graphics group, and creator of Nintendo GameCube’s graphic chip, joined Apple earlier this week.

In December, Apple took a 3.6% ownership stake in UK-based chip maker Imagination, and licensed its PowerVR graphics technology. PowerVR provides advanced graphics capabilities including OpenGL ES 2.0 support, and shader-based 3D graphics.

iPhone games are becoming more clever, and the platform’s library of titles is increasing day by day. While most next generation iPhone rumors are vague, Apple’s gaming-related investments are transparent. It’ll be fascinating to see what the results are.

 
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2 Comments For This Post

  1. JustCallMeBen Says:

    Apple getin serious about gaming?

    sorry, I love Apple, but as long as the keep putting low-end graphics chips in $2000+ computers, I wouldn’t call that serious. (I’m talking about the GeForce 9400M/GT120/GT130 in the iMacs)
    And please don’t start about the HD4850 option: that is a mid-range chip with a mid-range amount of memory, and it’s the best you can get in an iMac 🙁

    I’m not saying Apple should make the iMac a serious gaming monster, most iMac users won’t want an HD4870/90 with a gig of memory, but offering it as an option in a $2000 computer doesn’t seem THAT outrageous to me… is it?

    The only decent option is getting a Mac Pro with an HD4870… but that one only has 512MB of memory, which, again, is mid-end to today’s standards, and that’s the best Apple offers… I mean: this is what I call a gaming tragedy.

  2. mathiastck Says:

    Apple is dead on to be focusing on gaming. The iPhone/iPod touch did what the N-Gage could not. I stopped buying DS titles because there was so much good free content in the app store for my iPod touch.

    Rumor has it Sony will be trying to repeat Apple’s success by moving away from physical media to downloadable content.

    I would greatly appreciate it if Apple upgraded the iPod touch with a physical keyboard, and trackball + d-pad. Having only a touch screen makes a lot of real time games clumsy on the device. If Apple is investing in gaming then I hope it’s towards the design of their next device.

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