Apple eying the gaming industry?

Recent revelations and analyst reports recently fueled rumours that Apple may be considering entering the gaming industry, starting with additional iPod games.

First hints came out after Stan Ng, iPod Product Marketing VP, told iLounge during an online interview that Apple has formed a team of game developers for the iPod and that the company is interested in that market.

There is a team focused on iPod games, and they developed those two games. When we decided to do them internally, we looked at how we could leverage the incredible user interface of the iPod and create some games like Vortex that were just a lot of fun and unique to the iPod platform. So that was kind of the intent. The majority of the games are obviously coming from those third-party developers, and so the team is working with those third-party developers to get out the best titles.

Stan also said that many third-party developers contacted Apple because of their interest on making iPod compatible games and that feedback on the first iPod game titles was encouraging.

Meanwhile, Prudential analyst Jesse Tortora claimed in a recent report that Apple has hired staff for game development and could make some moves so as to enter that market in the future.

Apple has become a major player of the consumer computing industry since it has released the iPod and switched to the Intel architecture for its Macs. The presence of the company in the gaming industry is limited to a few games available on the latest generation iPod, with only two of them being developed by Apple. The Macintosh platform has historically been ignored by the majority of game developers.