Amazon, Google threaten to take over the living room | 10 Years Ago This Month

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The games industry moves pretty fast, and there's a tendency for all involved to look constantly to what's next without so much worrying about what came before. That said, even an industry so entrenched in the now can learn from its past. So to refresh our collective memory and perhaps offer some perspective on our field's history, GamesIndustry.biz runs this monthly feature highlighting happenings in gaming from exactly a decade ago.

When Sony and Microsoft successfully broke into the console industry with the PlayStation and the Xbox respectively, it sent a very powerful message to the games industry.

Video games are big business now, and some truly massive international giants are going to spend whatever it takes in order to make your business their business.

So as the 2000s dragged on and tech-savvy companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon grew terrifyingly large, the natural conclusion was that it would only be a matter of time before they turned their eye to video games and ate everybody's lunch, and there was nothing to be done about it. (It's important here that you disregard all knowledge of Panasonic's 3DO, Phillips' CD-I, or Apple's Pippin.)

This had actually been happening for a while before April of 2014. Here's a Digital Foundry editorial about Apple TV and rumors of a gaming system from 2011. Or maybe you'd prefer a 2012 interview with a gaming division of News Corp (another outsider firm attracted by the lure of game revenues) in which the representatives cheerfully hope that Google and Apple-branded TVs destroy the console market. Or the 2013 rumors of new game consoles from Google and Amazon, both of which were following on the microconsole trend kicked off by Ouya, which any gaming historian will tell you was "a freight train plow[ing] into the console games business… forever changing the console games landscape..."

April of 2014 was a big month for this trend