Phil Harrison: 'Apple will be the games industry'

Apple's strength is in its range of devices that 'are all part of the same ecosystem.'

We've heard that the future of games is in digital distribution, but ex-Sony veteran Phil Harrison thinks there's a good chance Apple will become the entire games industry in the next ten years.

When Harrison was asked by Edge where he saw Apple's position in the industry a decade from now, the former president of Sony Computer Entertainment's Worldwide Studios responded by saying "at this trajectory, if you extrapolate the market-share gains that they are making, forward for ten years - if they carry on unrestrained in their growth, then there's a pretty good chance that Apple will be the games industry."

It's all down to do with the sheer amount of iDevices consumers have in their home, says Harrison. "You've got iPhones, iPads, iPods, which are all part of the same ecosystem; the speed at which Apple sold 15 million iPads is phenomenal. And the number one activity on an iPad, according to some reports, is games, and I think that will only continue.

"The fact that the consumer purchase and discovery mechanism is so well integrated – you see something on the App Store, you click a button, the product delivers to your device. That end-to-end shopping experience, if you want to call it that, has been so elegantly built by Apple and they will continue to refine it."

Harrison also thinks that the next gaming war won't be fought with consoles but instead in browsers, but that doesn't mean current gaming brands will necessarily retire. "If that console, physical device goes away that's fine but that doesn't mean that PlayStation or Xbox as brands go away," he says. "It could be that the game and browser of the future is powered by PlayStation, or powered by Xbox Live or Nintendo. I think that that's where you'll see the battleground: not necessarily putting boxes full of chips and hard drives into your living room but giving you a storefront, navigation, discovery, a business model and user-interface."

"There is undoubtedly a generation of kids alive on the planet today who will never purchase a physical media package for any of their digital entertainment."

Harrison's views match those of many industry pioneers. In May id Software co-founder John Carmack said that he saw a future in cloud gaming.

It looks unlikely that publishers and developers are going to go entirely down this route for the next generation of consoles, however - last week VideoGamer.com discovered that Crytek was developing for the next generation of consoles, though the publisher has since denied this.