The Earthworm Jim developer sees Apple as a huge competetor to modern consoles and handhelds.

"I think the threat to consoles is actually Apple. I think the concern there is that they're generating hardware so quickly now. If you're creating and shipping new hardware every 12 months, and during that 12 months you're also giving pretty impressive upgrades, the features that people want, and you're giving them those every 6 months and hardware every 12 months, I think the idea that you would have five to seven years on hardware refreshes is becoming a technical problem. So I honestly don't think we're a challenge at all for the consoles, I just think the consoles are different. The world is changing," Perry said.

"Another example of that is the handhelds. I think the handhelds are getting challenged very aggressively by the mobile phones. I find myself spending a lot of money on iPhone, and if you look at a handheld today, the one's that people keep making, they still make them as a gaming machine – I was at a speech and there was this guy, Ken Robinson, and he asked how many people in the audience wear wristwatches, and he said when you talk to younger kids today, most of them don't have wristwatches, and the reason is they only do one thing. And they don't want to carry anything that just does one thing. They carry their phone and it does everything. And so if you make single function devices, then you've got a problem. That's my concern for handhelds, is this single function side of it."

Perry continued by drawing a parallel between what consoles are trying to do and what the iPad already does: multimedia playback.

"Consoles are trying to change as quickly as they can to become entertainment devices, and everyone is saying 'you can play your music on it' and 'you can watch movies on it' and that entertainment device strategy is the way to save consoles. For handhelds that's a really hard thing to do. I know they're adding Netflix and stuff, but they really need to be that sort of multifunction device to survive. And if you think about it, that ultimately turns them into cellphones. So I don't think cloud gaming is their problem," he explained.

"I mean I just find myself impulse purchasing because they keep the prices down. If the iPhone games were $60 each, or £60 in the UK? So Imagine your iPhone games were £60 each, you'd be hesitating all the time. But when it's £2 or whatever then you're like 'OK' and you click on it, and now that microtransactions have kicked in, there's a game I've recently spent $90 on, there's another game I spent $70 on. And I'm a big fan of that idea, you only pay for the games you love. So you fall in love with a game, and you spend a bunch of money in it, no harm no foul."

Epic Games' Mike Capps agrees with Perry. Check out his comments here.

via Games Industry

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