How important is that? Let's look at Microsoft. Superficially, the US company ought to feel most confident of its chances in the next-gen living room. The big news came in March, when it was revealed that more people use Xbox 360 to watch online entertainment than online gaming.
This was the Redmond company's masterplan all along - gaming was only ever a fig leaf to disguise its true ambition to be the entertainment hub of the home. Any lingering doubts over that were put to rest by recent hardcore-unfriendly innovations such as the casual-chasing, never-quite-working-properly Kinect, the ad-soaked, game-demoting Metro dashboard, and the culling of its popular, internally-produced Inside Xbox video content.
A key concern for Microsoft is that it never saw Apple coming. Nor did anyone else. When Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii launched, there was no such thing as an iPhone and no App Store. Last week Angry Birds passed 1 billion downloads. The gaming world is not what it was - despite the best attempts of next month's increasingly anachronistic, dinosaur's playground at the LA Convention Centre to pretend otherwise.
I've no doubt the next Xbox will have the eye-popping specs to wow the hardcore - even if self-interested Epic doesn't think it does yet - but it's hard to shake the creeping sense of disregard for the loyal gaming audience that made Xbox a success, which risks backfiring as it all too nakedly and greedily chases its entertainment dream.
Piss off your audience enough and they'll just go elsewhere next time. Or, at least, play wait-and-see when early adoption could be so crucial.
The subscription model Microsoft's trialing with 360 may be part of the answer, with the potential to massively reduce day one outlay on the next generation. Either way, these are exciting but uncertain times for the console business as everyone tries to figure out, after decades slavishly following the same cyclical blueprint, what on earth it's supposed to look like in the future.
If anything at all is clear, another £425 machine - PlayStation 3's UK launch price - surely cannot be a successful part of it.
Which bring us back to Apple. A dedicated TV would presumably carry a premium price tag, and people don't update TVs as they do phones or even computers. But it's futile speculating about pricing models for something no-one is certain even exists yet. More relevantly, the merest idea of iTV brings into sharp relief the issues facing the traditional console biz as it prepares for the next generation.
But what of gaming on an Apple television? The problem with all the guesswork surrounding the possibility - including this piece - is that assumptions are based on how Apple might mash-up existing ideas and technologies. There's a very good chance it's got something amazing in the works no-one else has considered.
Either way, an iOS-powered, App Store-fuelled, Siri-and-Facetime-enabled, iPhone-and-iPad-controlled contraption seems a sensible, basic expectation.
For gamers, there's little excitement in the idea of playing Angry Birds on a bigger screen. What is exciting are the new possibilities it would open up for imaginative game designers, with a big screen, streaming all sorts of content, now linked to the small one in our hands.
As with smartphones, it was never a question of one form of gaming replacing another. A beautifully simple touchscreen game can perfectly co-exist with a beautifully complex console game.
It's not an either/or issue for games even if it is for some gamers. No, the question for console makers is: can their next devices perfectly co-exist with each others' - and Apple's?
This was the Redmond company's masterplan all along - gaming was only ever a fig leaf to disguise its true ambition to be the entertainment hub of the home. Any lingering doubts over that were put to rest by recent hardcore-unfriendly innovations such as the casual-chasing, never-quite-working-properly Kinect, the ad-soaked, game-demoting Metro dashboard, and the culling of its popular, internally-produced Inside Xbox video content.
A key concern for Microsoft is that it never saw Apple coming. Nor did anyone else. When Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii launched, there was no such thing as an iPhone and no App Store. Last week Angry Birds passed 1 billion downloads. The gaming world is not what it was - despite the best attempts of next month's increasingly anachronistic, dinosaur's playground at the LA Convention Centre to pretend otherwise.
I've no doubt the next Xbox will have the eye-popping specs to wow the hardcore - even if self-interested Epic doesn't think it does yet - but it's hard to shake the creeping sense of disregard for the loyal gaming audience that made Xbox a success, which risks backfiring as it all too nakedly and greedily chases its entertainment dream.
Piss off your audience enough and they'll just go elsewhere next time. Or, at least, play wait-and-see when early adoption could be so crucial.
The subscription model Microsoft's trialing with 360 may be part of the answer, with the potential to massively reduce day one outlay on the next generation. Either way, these are exciting but uncertain times for the console business as everyone tries to figure out, after decades slavishly following the same cyclical blueprint, what on earth it's supposed to look like in the future.
If anything at all is clear, another £425 machine - PlayStation 3's UK launch price - surely cannot be a successful part of it.
Which bring us back to Apple. A dedicated TV would presumably carry a premium price tag, and people don't update TVs as they do phones or even computers. But it's futile speculating about pricing models for something no-one is certain even exists yet. More relevantly, the merest idea of iTV brings into sharp relief the issues facing the traditional console biz as it prepares for the next generation.
But what of gaming on an Apple television? The problem with all the guesswork surrounding the possibility - including this piece - is that assumptions are based on how Apple might mash-up existing ideas and technologies. There's a very good chance it's got something amazing in the works no-one else has considered.
Either way, an iOS-powered, App Store-fuelled, Siri-and-Facetime-enabled, iPhone-and-iPad-controlled contraption seems a sensible, basic expectation.
For gamers, there's little excitement in the idea of playing Angry Birds on a bigger screen. What is exciting are the new possibilities it would open up for imaginative game designers, with a big screen, streaming all sorts of content, now linked to the small one in our hands.
As with smartphones, it was never a question of one form of gaming replacing another. A beautifully simple touchscreen game can perfectly co-exist with a beautifully complex console game.
It's not an either/or issue for games even if it is for some gamers. No, the question for console makers is: can their next devices perfectly co-exist with each others' - and Apple's?
