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Apple Arcade Announces New and Updated Games Coming in October
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Woot! Kinda off-topic, but my home town is part of the Jeopardy question (sorry, answer) shown in the press release.
Remember Apple Maps when it first came out?
Look at it now
These strategies take a decade to play out.
Apple gaming will get there someday. For now it's casual games
It took a decade for Apple Maps to go from "nice effort, but lacking in comparison" to "slowly equaling & perhaps besting the leader in some areas"
Now look at search. Apple is way too smart to just attack Google on search. But slowly & surely they have added more search results in various parts of iOS, from Siri to swiping down on the Home Screen. It's Playing The Long Game.
Gaming is similar. You don't get A-list games overnight.
That's why I said small gaming companies. Which could be either technology or a game framework or a game itself.
Remember how Apple excoriated Flash because it would suck the life out of mobile phone batteries? Compare that to cross-platform gaming engines vs. writing a game with Metal & Apple's gaming APIs.
This is especially important on Vision Pro, which sucks the life out of batteries pretty quickly. The Elephant in The Room is that Vision Pro is going to be (among other things) an awesome gaming platform. You don't want inefficient ports & cross-platform gaming engines running stuff on there.
I bought an iOS game recently that does nothing when it is waiting for user input ("select a game" screen) except this little animation, and my phone gets super hot. Super inefficient. Partly the fault of the developers of the game, partly the cross-platform tool it's written in.
As Apple ramps up gaming, there will be a gamers' edition of AppleTV (why else is it around as hardware?); there will be higher/pricier levels of Apple Arcade, like there is with iCloud.
You gotta start somewhere. Apple isn't creating all these gaming APIs, & Metal, and visionOS for nothing
As Apple ramps up gaming, there will be a gamers' edition of AppleTV (why else is it around as hardware?); there will be higher/pricier levels of Apple Arcade, like there is with iCloud.
You gotta start somewhere. Apple isn't creating all these gaming APIs, & Metal, and visionOS for nothing
I bought a Switch, bought a game for $40, played it for an hour or two, got bored of it, returned it and never played the Switch again.
"I returned the game, but the console still sits on my shelf—and I'll never play it!" That'll show 'em.
I'm sure that's true for some people. It's not true for others, me for example. I like Apple Arcade because I've not played these mobile games in the past (because I tend not to pay for games and I hate adverts) and I find them an enjoyable way to 'waste my time'. Would I pay for Arcade on its own? Well, see 'I tend not to pay for games'. But do I enjoy it as part of Apple One? I certainly do.
i would be good if apple just bought some standard games that they could have in the library all the time -- give us a decent solitaire, chess, checkers, backgammon, mahjong, ludo, suduko, stuff like that, give them all a common look, tie them into game center with online competition, and make them work well with whatever iphone, ipad or mac you've got... give the whole thing a solid base upon which they can add all those mobile games.
a bit like how microsoft has their own version of solitaire which they ship with windows
a bit like how microsoft has their own version of solitaire which they ship with windows
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I mean, chess comes on every Mac, but afaik it's the exact same app that shipped on NextSTEP a million years ago. MS Solitaire is basically unchanged since the dawn of time, last I checked. I can appreciate that you personally would find those games neat to have, but there is less than zero market for backgammon (aka, that game on the back of the checkers/chess board at gama's house) or Mahjong or checkers. There are perfectly good apps in the store for suduko and chess with game center integration... it's not unified or built-in, but those still cater to a pretty small market so that makes sense.
I didn't want to show them... I returned the game because it was boring and I sold the switch on FB marketplace last month for $40
I bought the switch for that game, but I can understand everyone has their own perspective even if I vehemently disagree with it.
I played both new Zelda's for almost 100 hours each..... and I agree with you in many ways. I obviously enjoyed them to some degree, but I was waaaay done by the time I stopped. I honestly think half the breathless hype is down to it "being Zelda." If it were another IP then I have serious doubts that I would have played them for more than a few hours before giving up.