Are TVs The Next Gaming Platform?

TV retailers may soon find themselves selling sets not simply as home entertainment displays, but as gaming platforms. Increasingly accessible cloud gaming could potentially relegate dedicated gaming consoles and PCs to a more specialized, high-performance product category.

Samsung and Amazon recently combined at a New York City event to demonstrate their respective TV gaming wares. Samsung has offered its Gaming Hub on its smart TVs since 2022, while Amazon’s formerly $10/month Luna cloud gaming service, including its family-oriented GameNight titles, has been available to Amazon Prime subscribers for the last year at no additional charge.

Both Kevin Beatty, head of product for Samsung Visual Display, and Jeff Gattis, GM of gaming at Amazon, see the gaming hardware market bifurcating.

Dedicated console platforms such as Sony PlayStation, Microsoft Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and gaming PCs would continue serving serious gamers demanding maximum performance, while TVs could bring friendlier and easier family-oriented big-screen gaming to a much larger population using cloud gaming services and, increasingly, smartphones as controllers.

“The type of compute that’s going into the next generation of consoles is going to be more powerful than whatever your out-of-the-box TV is,” Beatty acknowledged, adding that he doesn’t envision Samsung trying to build a TV competitive with the next Xbox or PlayStation.

Gattis similarly expects consoles and gaming PCs to “continue to be there for the high end of the market,” but sees TVs serving everybody else who isn’t prepared to spend heavily on dedicated gaming hardware.

Billions Of Potential Players

The potential TV gaming audience dwarfs the traditional console and PC market. Gattis noted that nearly 3 billion people worldwide play video games, compared to only about 500 million consoles and gaming PCs. Many of the remainder already play on smartphones and other devices.

Amazon is attempting to push some of this mass of more casual non-console or PC gamers toward the biggest screen in the house by removing both extra hardware and cost barriers. Luna lets multiple players scan a QR code and use their smartphones as controllers, while Prime members get nearly 100 games at no additional cost. According to Gattis, Luna’s monthly active player base has grown fivefold since Amazon revamped the service last October, split almost evenly between casual and traditional controller-based games.

Beatty sees gaming becoming increasingly integrated with TV entertainment itself, including adding gaming, trisive consumption to a little bit more participatory.” Eventually, Beatty envisions viewers being able to “press pause on the movie itself,” explore its world interactively, then return to the movie

A New TV Selling Point

For retailers, this TV-as-gaming-platform effort potentially creates another reason for consumers to upgrade to a newer, perhaps higher-priced TV, and another capability to demonstrate on the sales floor.

“If that [customer who’s] not a gamer, and all of a sudden they’re coming in, they’re looking at maybe buying a game, maybe they’re looking at buying a new TV,” Beatty predicts. “The fact that cloud gaming exists on [TVs] is a big selling point.” Beatty also expects TV-centric gaming accessories to emerge as a separate category, ranging from traditional gamepads to other TV gaming peripherals.

Gattis expects gaming functionality to spread across more TV brands as cloud gaming services become more ubiquitous. Game-centric TVs could eventually let retailers pitch the family TV as an all-in-one entertainment and gaming hub — with opportunities extending beyond controllers to upgraded home networking needed to keep all that cloud gaming running smoothly.

Gattis sees making gaming more broadly accessible as the ultimate direction for how TVs are marketed and sold.

“Cloud gaming, or gaming in general, is becoming more accessible than it’s ever been,” Gaddis opined. “I think all this is about how we let more people play, and I think we’re on the quest for that.”