When Apple launched its Arcade gaming subscription service in September 2019, it attracted a ton of attention – as with everything the company does. By offering 100 premium (that is, ad-infected) mobile games for a monthly subscription fee of £4.99/$4.99 (now £6.99), and the promise of more titles to come , it was an attempt to bring the Netflix business model to gaming.
It offered an alternative in a mobile gaming market where free-to-play and ad-supported games were dominant. The dominance of giants like Genshin Impact, Clash of Clans and Candy Crush previously made it difficult for the makers of paid, premium games to find an audience, but Arcade offered a range of curated titles that could run on Apple’s devices – iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV – without ads or in-app purchases. Games also worked offline, eliminating the annoyance of being kicked out of a game on the London Underground.
Five years later, the market looks very different. Consumers are being bombarded with new subscription services for TV, movies and games, while legacy platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime are aggressively expanding into Apple territory with their own gaming offerings. What does this mean for Arcade? Is it still a priority for Apple?
Alex Rofman is senior director of Arcade, a 15-year Apple veteran who has been in and around mobile gaming since its inception. “2023 was a great year for us,” he says. “All of our critical metrics reached record highs. Two of the highlights for me were the launch of Hello Kitty Island Adventure – an incredibly popular IP that hadn’t quite found its home in the gaming world yet – and What the Car, the winning mobile game of the year at the Dice Awards previous month. ”
Apple’s strategic thinking is always viewed critically. The company’s opaqueness surrounding its business decisions has essentially created a whole crop of tech analysts. But Rofman describes a fairly simple approach to setting up Arcade. “It was about games that were just designed to be fun and engaging, not built around a business model, not built around timers or video ads,” he says. “We didn’t necessarily want to replicate the top genres on mobile, we weren’t looking for a match-three that was better than Candy Crush… we focused on games that wouldn’t have had a chance without Arcade. ”
“On Apple Arcade, we can bring extremely silly and original premium experiences to a very broad audience… It’s hard for me to imagine how to make players laugh when they’re interrupted by ads,” said Tim Garbos, co-founder of Triband , the developer of What the Car.
Looking at Arcade today, innovative titles like Assemble With Care, Card of Darkness, Neo Cab and Mutazione still get front page space. But there is also a great emphasis on family games such as Hello Kitty, Tamagotchi and Disney. This makes practical sense for a large group of Apple users: tech-savvy parents with bored kids. “Free-to-play games are not particularly family-friendly,” says Rofman. “They don’t necessarily have offensive themes, but parents can’t hand their iPad to their kid in a free-to-play game and feel comfortable that there won’t be $100 in currency purchases or anything like that.”
This, alongside the increasing number of older, lovingly received App Store games like Fruit Ninja, Jetpack Joyride, and Threes being folded into Apple Arcade, seems to represent a change in direction since the opening catalog. At the time, it seemed like Apple thought Arcade would be for fans of cool, unusual indie games they just couldn’t find in the App Store: well-reviewed, award-winning titles from producers like Annapurna, Die Gute Fabrik, and Devolver. dominated the selection. They are still there, but not in the same numbers. Family games have taken over.
But Rofman is keen to reiterate Apple’s commitment to interesting indies. “Arcade is a place for games that might not otherwise exist, and I think that’s a really important part of our strategy,” he says. “We finance the development of new games so that developers can build them without risk. What the Car is a perfect example of this. Another is Sneaky Sasquatch: the developer RAC7 consists of two guys who have been making games together since they were in high school. They don’t want to run a studio. It was really great to see the success and growth of that game. It fits well with Apple’s values: it’s an incredibly deep, challenging game, but there’s no violence. There is nothing offensive. So we think Arcade is an outlet for indie studios with creative, innovative ideas. That is still important to us and it always will be.”
There have been dissenting voices. In February, industry website mobilegamer.biz published an article in which unnamed developers expressed their frustrations with the service. Some pointed to a large number of canceled projects, which could have a devastating effect on smaller studios. Others claimed that royalty payments for games are declining and that Apple appeared to be placing a lower priority on the service. Rofman naturally defends the company’s reputation. “Regarding the article, developers of games whose player bases are growing can expect their bonus pool revenues to grow as well, as they are based on engagement,” he says. “But as you can imagine, despite the incredibly high quality of our catalog, not every game in a catalog of over 200 titles will grow its player base month after month.”
He also disputes the idea that Arcade is a victim of Apple’s perceived lack of interest in games. “Games are more important to Apple now than ever before,” he says. “You can see this in the investment we have made in silicon. Finally, Macs are capable of running high-performance games in ways that weren’t possible 10 or 15 years ago. And especially with the latest iPhones, you can now play an immersive, high-performance game on a device that fits in your pocket. I think you’ll continue to see investment and focus in the gaming space because games are incredible and our devices are great gaming devices.
In the future, Apple Arcade will include games made for the company’s critically acclaimed Vision Pro. The spatial computing device was launched with twelve native games – a mix of brand new titles and well-known games supplemented with spatial elements. “Spatial gaming is probably the most important thing right now,” says Rofman. “If you think about it, since the invention of touch gaming, there hasn’t really been much innovation in the types of games we all play. The graphics are better and TVs are getting thinner, but there hasn’t been any innovation in terms of gameplay styles and input methods for a long time. Vision Pro opens up a whole new world of possibilities and we are just scratching the surface.”
Vision Pro will be a niche product for a few more years, perhaps forever. In the meantime, Apple should continue to support independent developers and showcase a wider range of new, unlicensed titles. Whatever problems it faces, Apple Arcade plays a crucial role in the mobile gaming ecosystem. People are pitting it against Netflix and Amazon, but where it’s really going, content-wise, is the Nintendo Switch: family-friendly but challenging games in a safe, heavily curated environment, stripped of invasive free-to-play revenue. Rofman believes 2023 was a banner year, but with competition increasing and developers struggling, Apple Arcade’s ambitions will be truly tested in 2024.