Apple inCider (or Apple Gaming Strategy Theory #1)
Just wanted to share a quick post to share this link about Transgaming's Cider from Red Herring. Not a lot of information, but it appears Cider allows game developers to basically wrap their Windows game such that it can run on an Intel Mac. The key appears to be that a developer can use their existing source code base without a lot of changes. I'm sort of thinking of Cider as Parallels for gaming... which sort of leads me back to possible Apple strategies for gaming.
There are a few plays I can imagine, but I only have time to write up one now. That theory, in short, is that I can imagine Apple creating a Cider equivalent, but tied to OS X. I personally believe Boot Camp is a step on that continuum. As you probably know, Boot Camp allows you to dual-boot between different OSes. The next logical step has already been taken by Parallels, which enables virtualization (or allowing both Windows and Windows applications to run inside of OS X). Many people believe virtualization belongs in the OS directly, so it's not hard to imagine Apple working hard to enable this in the next version of OS X. And at that point, it's not that much more of a step to create an "Intel Mac Gaming SDK" that enables game developers to optimize what's basically their Windows game codebase and simply run on the Mac, just as Cider appears to allow. Heck, I could even see Apple shortcutting the whole process and just acquiring Transgaming and putting those guys to work on the OS directly.
This would be a huge step forward for Apple as it could resolve that nagging problem of not having enough games on the platform. It's probably of smaller benefit to the game industry as a whole since the total number of games being sold may not go up dramatically (after all, people are likely to buy only one copy for whichever system they want to play on). What it doesn't address is Apple's desire to expand iTunes reach into the living room and other devices... which I think leads to Apple's other potential gaming strategy. More on that later.