I think these connected to TV devices are a wasted opportunity for gaming. They are great for family type video games and with some marketing from apple or Google they could sell tons of games. I happily paid for Beach Buggy, a Mario Kart type game, my kids are loving it and I think that the company makes a lot of money from this game alone.

But the support from Google is abysmal. No search functionality, developer hostility when trying to publish something etc.

There are however some games which thrive on apple tv. The virtual cycling game zwift is probably one of the most important apple tv games, it's the recommended system to get the game running on the cheap.

So, if you're making an app that benefits from a big screen and your customers are willing to buy a cheap dedicated device to easily use your app on a big screen, supporting apple tv might be a very sensible choice.

> if you're making an app that benefits from a big screen and your customers are willing to buy a cheap dedicated device to easily use your app on a big screen, supporting apple tv might be a very sensible choice.

Compared to other HDMI-connected devices (e.g. Google Streamer fka ChromeCast, Amazon FireTV, Roku) or major TV platforms like Android TV or Samsung and LG, the market share that Apple TV commands is dwarfed. Apple TV devices are also very expensive.

A startup like Zwift that bets on Apple TV as a key GTM strategy is making an error in judgment. Apple TV is extreme long tail footprint.

AppleTV is much more similar to a game console than the mentioned devices. It has a small set of powerful CPU/GPU/memory combos vs the menagerie of disparate and mostly much lower power hardware under the broad tent of “Google related tv platform” stuff.

Meh, I'd say it's a cheap addition when you already have to support iOS and iPadOS devices. Also market share is secondary if people are willing to buy it as a dedicated device and it is cheap (130$) when talking about people's expenditures for this hobby.

But yeah, I'm not an Insider and I'd love to know why they're supporting the apple tv but don't offer the Android App on the Google tv platform. Maybe something about non universal remote inputs or the wildly varying hw capabilities leading to support nightmares (but that's always an issue on Android).

> cheap addition when you already have to support iOS and iPadOS devices.

Presentation form factor and input modality is different on LRUD compared to touch, 10’ vs handheld.

There’s an opportunity cost: it is better to improve the user experience on the vast majority of TV devices (eg Samsung or Android TV or Fire tv) than it is to support a tiny market share device like Apple TV that you now also need to keep up to date.

We are specifically talking about 3D games here.

three.js then?

godot seems cool, would love to get some vision lite dev kit in a few years to play with

> Apple TV for games is super niche

Order(s) of magnitude less niche than Apple Vision.

If you want your game picked up for Apple Arcade ($$$), you need to support Apple TV.

If they could just let Geforce Now (NVIDIA Cloud gaming platform) ship a native app I would use my Apple TV much more. But no, they prefer to be extremely hostile to users over some app store bs.

You can still use moonlight.

> Apple TV for games is super niche,

Apple TV is just a tale of so many missed opportunities.