Smartphones like the iPhone have cut into the market of portable game consoles. Valve's Gabe Newell thinks that Apple will eventually try to supplant home consoles as well, though he admits he has no knowledge of what exactly that hardware would be.
"I suspect Apple will launch a living-room product that redefines people's expectations really strongly and the notion of a separate console platform will disappear," said Newell according to The Seattle Times.
Newell also criticized closed platforms, including Apple. "I'm worried that the things that traditionally have been the source of a lot of innovation are going," he shared. "There's going to be an attempt to close those off so somebody will say, 'I'm tired of competing with Google, I'm tired of competing with Facebook, I'll apply a console model and exclude the competitors I don't like from my world.'"
"I consider Apple to be very closed," Newell said. "Let's say you have a book business and you are charging 5 to 7 percent gross margins. You can't exist in an Apple world because they want 30 percent and they don't care that you only have 7 percent to play with."
