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Apple Makes Another Play For Hardcore Gamers With Latest iPads

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(Image captured by David Bloom)

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Apple is using its latest spec-busting hardware to appeal to hard-core gamers who actually care about such things. Except the world's most valuable tech company is unlikely to have any more success enticing those hard-core players than they have in the past, eye-popping hardware capabilities be damned.

At this week's Brooklyn event unveiling new MacBook Airs and iPad Pros, Apple CEO Tim Cook spotlighted just a handful of programs that will run on the latter, including two from major game publishers: 2K Games' NBA2K 2019 and an upcoming version of Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed franchise.

Cook called the iPad "a magical piece of glass that transforms instantly to anything you want it to be," and said Apple has sold more than 400 million iPads, including 44.2 million in the past year, outselling even the notebook PC lineups of all major PC makers.
Not content to call it the best-selling tablet device, Cook and John Ternus, the company's VP of hardware engineering, touted the new models' Apple-designed eight-core A12X Bionic CPU and T2 security chip, a seven-core graphics chip, its Liquid Retina high-resolution display, its Neural Engine machine-learning chip, and up to 1 terabyte of storage capacity.
Those mean little to nothing to non-hardware geeks, but are designed to set to slavering the hardware hyped who like their gameplay fast, fast, fast. Indeed, senior director of worldwide developer relations Shaan Pruden in showcasing that unreleased Assassin's Creed game said it was running at a zippy 120 frames per second. That's speedy enough to satisfy the most serious of gamer geeks.
Twice during the presentation, Cook and Ternus said the new iPads are "faster than 92 percent of all portable PCs sold in the last 12 months." Ternus claimed the  two new iPad Pro models (both use the same CPU) "delivers Xbox One S performance" in a far more portable and self-contained package.

Greg Thomas, an executive vice president of 2K Games, a Take-Two Interactive unit, then came on stage to drive home the point. After demonstrating game play and the remarkably fine visual detail (sweat, tattoos, individually rendered fans in the stands) onscreen, Thomas declared that NBA 2K 2019 gameplay is "an experience that rivals consoles for the first time."

Except, it'll take more than hot hardware specifications to get gamers to sign up for a new (to them) platform from Apple.

“Apple has been so distant from gaming that it’s going to take more than a new release of hardware with higher specs to attract the professional and competitive gaming circuit,” said Ed Tomasi, managing director of esports at Big Block and Subnation.

Even NBA2K may face some challenges. That's even though the NBA, several of its franchises and actual basketball players have bought into an esports league based on the title. Consider esports the high-performance end of hard-core gaming. Where those esports pros go, the rest of the PC gaming industry tends to follow.

But Apple has long ceded any leadership on the PC gaming sector to Windows-based machines. Despite all the talk of equaling Xbox performance in a handheld device, don't expect a stampede to the iPad Pro anytime soon.

Yes, Apple has made a lot of money selling casual-game apps, which comprise a large portion of the $137 billion worldwide that analyst NewZoo projects will be spent on game sector this year.

As handheld devices get more powerful, and run cross-platform, multiplayer, social games, the sector is ripe to attract more high-end players with their influential product preferences.  Asus, Razer and Samsung all have rolled out prodigiously capable gamer-oriented smartphones in the past year to try to tap into that market.

Samsung even cut a deal with Epic Games to secure exclusive availability for the initial August launch on Android of Fortnite, still the world's most popular game. The exclusive was timed to the launch of Samsung's Note9 phablet, which Samsung has been promoting heavily to hardcore gamers. One of Fortnite's many charms has been its cross-platform social gameplay. Even someone on a mobile phone can take on console or PC players, chatting with them all the while.

“It’s not so much about the capabilities of the iPad Pro as it is the cultural relevance of the games on the device,” said Seven Volpone, CEO at Big Block and Subnation. “Professional gamers with thousands of dollars in equipment still oftentimes choose to play Fortnite on a mobile device because of the social and cultural connection.”

And that's going to be the challenge Apple faces, even as it touts the new iPad Pros to skeptical hardcore gamers who've heard these pitches from Apple before. High-end players with $5,000 Windows-based PC rigs won't necessarily blink at the $1,149 cost of a mid-tier 12.9-inch iPad.  The real key is who else can they can talk to while they're playing, and on what titles. Until those popular cross-platform games hit iPad regularly and quickly, don't expect Apple to score with the world's best gamers, no matter what their specs.

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