i totally agree with Activision man. COD is a way more successful series than Halo and Halo did sell the 1st xbox. Id buy an activision console day 1 if the next COD became exclusive to it.

I think there is a miss understanding of what I meant by "establish a market" ...

I don't mean that Apple invents a product that has never been seen before (after all, most of Apple's "revolutionary" products are very derivitave of what others have done) just that Apple moves into a market space that is being served very poorly by current competitiors and creates a product that introduces far more interest in the market.

With that said, Apple's success is heavily determined by how long they're in a market without strong competition. The iPod was on the market for several years before major companies addressed the iPod, and because of this the iPod became ubiquitous and Apple retains control of this market. The iPhone didn’t face significant competition from consumer level smartphones for a couple years after release and as a result Apple is only slowly losing market-share to their competition. With the iPad, Apple is facing strong competition months after release and Apple will (probably) bleed market-share rather quickly in this market. In terms of laptops and PCs, Apple is a minor player in both these markets because there is so much strong competition;  after all, very few people are willing to pay twice as much for a computer simply to buy it with an Apple logo.

If Apple entered into the home console market they would be in the same kind of position they're in with laptops and desktops; and they would be lucky if they only lost $4 billion to get the same 20 Million customers Microsoft got with the original XBox.

Sega got rid of 95% of their hardware business is gone and they don't have the capital to rebuild it. To get into the console market today you need billions in capital for R&D and marketing Sega are to poor.

EA doesn't need or want their own hardware platform and given their sports licences require them to be on all platforms anyway. Origin is the closest thing to a platform they will ever have.

Capcom are to poor and have nothing to gain but everything to lose none of their franchises are mega faranchises (10 million+) on a global scale. An atempt at a console would kill them.

Activision COD is all they have on consoles and would probably be the only game that would sell well on their platform and exclusivity for anything but Xbox would kill the franchise, half of their revenue comes from Blizzard PC games and they won't work on consoles and you don't want to piss off 12 million gamers when you move WoW onto a console.

The only ones that have the neccessary capital and market imact ATM are

Apple as they can leverage apps on their platform and we will likely see it when the next apple TV launches.

And Samsung who have large hardware manufacturing and distrabution networks including semiconductor fabs, have many of the same reasons as Sony to be in the business (pushing high end TVs etc) and most importantly the billions of $$$ needed to push into the market.

i think Apple should join up with Nintendo.

Apple, Activision, and Google could potentially be contendors. I very much doubt they will enter(with the exception of google), but if they did, I could see some major shake ups in the industry. Sega....not so much...

I honestly don't want someone entering unless someone drops out.

Anyways, I guess...maybe Apple. I think anyone that tries to join would find it hard to have worthwhile first party exclusives to distinguish themself.

some of you guys are looking at this wrong. The key to a successful console isn't selling XXX units, but making fiscal sense for the company. Why would activision make their own console and lose so many potential sales when they have the best selling ip on both sony's and microsoft's consoles.. They won't make those sales up by selling consoles. They would probably have to sell their system at a loss to ever hope to gain any marketshare. The only company that could be a serious contender for the system war is apple because they should easily be able to sell their console for a profit as long as they make sure its shiny. They also won't lose any potential sales because they don't make any games for current consoles. They will just have to be willing to spend some money on buying or making a few first party studios.

Any company introducing a new console would have to either price it cheaply and take an initial loss OR introduce something new nintendo-ish.

Either way, I dont see Sega willing to take the risk for what could be another failure like the DC especially when the market is so crowded right now. However there are rumours floating around that sega are setting up to enter the console market again so who knows. Same with Capcom - i dont think they are big enough to be able to absorb losses that a new console may incur (even if in the R&D stages - i believe sony stated at E3 that they are spending >$100M in R&D).

EA would have to rely on its own games such as ME and Battlefield which are very good but will gamers buy a new console to get them. Maybe we can look at the online Origin store to look at sales and see how this goes (i know its not the same thing)?

Activision could make a good console and attract gamers with their owned IPs but a lot of hardcore gamers hate em and would boycott the console. And looking at the initially loss making xbox and ps3 consoles, would they want to risk it?

Valve could, they could release a steam console and as long as they have 3rd party support they can be successful.

Apple could release there "Causal Console" that uses a iphone/ipad as a controller.