The Sad State of Apple Arcade in 2024

This channel is doing more for Mac gaming than Apple itself!

As someone who use to love Apple Arcade I’ll be honest the pain of losing games that I love playing really hurts

I was just thinking about how bad Apple Arcade has gotten. It used to be a place where you could get premium games that were unique. Now they’re only for kids. I would like to see more adult focused games.

Netfix is beating Apple to the punch now with their line up of games, if only Apple could have invested in that direction

I think there are two major problems: - Lack of good attachable controllers for iPhone and iPad, or good on-screen controls like in PUBG. - No AAA games in the service. All the AAA games that they've used to promote devices should be included in Apple Arcade. Additionally, games like Divinity: Original Sin 2 should be part of the service.

Imagine if Apple put Resident Evil 4, 7, Village, Assasin's Creed Shadows and Mirage, Death Stranding etc. all in one Apple Arcade subscription, it would be an actual worthwhile proposition.

Game dev here.... This is exactly why Apple gaming will not take off in my humble opinion, Apple needs to be the one doing the work, inviting devs, encouraging them, supporting them.... But instead they seem to have that philosophy of, devs will come crawling to us because we're Apple, and while they're at it, let's make 32GB of RAM cost $400, and let's sell them a USB-C port for the Vision Pro to debug their apps and games for $300 (yes, you heard that right, they're selling a USB-C port necessary to developer for $300). I myself as a developer, and each time Apple goes on stage yapping about how great their platform is, I'm like okey so how are you going to assist us in making games for your platform, and they're like No, we're the big guy in this relationship, you need us, so we won't spend any effort helping you, in fact, we'll profit from you by jacking up the prices of the development tools you need. And we developers are like fine, we are not developing for you then, and then they wonder how that happened and decide to say the same thing the next time they go on stage, just with a different tone.

Imagine if Apple had developed their own controller in the early days of MFI as an example to hardware and software developers. They could be competing with Nintendo by now in the gaming space.

It's because Apple doesn't care, has never cared about games.

The main reason why you're seeing all of these hypercasual and grind-heavy games is to keep you engaged in the game for as long as possible to convince Apple to keep the game on the platform. On their discord, a Hello Kitty Island Adventure publically said that the main reason why that game has so many parts of the game where you have to wait a day or two is so they can look at their engagement statistics to convince Apple to keep them on their platform. It's one of the key reasons why Apple might not renew contracts for games that are leaving. You all will need to somehow convince Apple that you want the high-quality games, which would mean replaying them, or start boycotting the service until things change.

You can’t tie yourself to a subscription service and expect a constant level of quality. They all begin to rot after the growth phase is over.

All those Hyper casual mobile games in Apple Arcade are boring

MrMac we are upset but with apple because we want the steam app

What's worse, all the premium games that are really worth playing end up on Nintendo Switch and consoles 6 months - 1 year later. So it's worth waiting anyways.

From the initial launch, I thought the cross-progression between desktop, TV and mobile would trump Switch's flexibility. But I think AppleTV let it down. If it could run No Man's Sky, RE, etc. so one purchase would give you access in all those contexts, I believe it'd be a USP in gaming. It'd even have the edge over Steam Deck, because you always have your phone with you anyway. An M-series chip would take care of the power, but I also gather there are system-restrictions on things like locally-stored content that scupper even non-demanding games. Shame. They could have been a real player.

What was the racing game featured with a BMW going over what looks like the Golden State Bridge?

Great articulation of exactly what is wrong with Apple Arcade. It's yet another gaming initiative that Apple threw out and started neglecting when they grew bored of it. Thanks for highlighting it, you're easily the best YouTuber/journalist working the beat of gaming on Apple platforms.

you should talk about netflix games, i think has more potential.

Am actually thinking of getting a steamdeck.. I thought apple will do more… Netflix is what am hanging up to now

I’d love for Apple to include we actually want to play. I’d love to have Capcom, SNK, Konami, & Midway ports of their classic arcade games. They need to hire real gamers for Apple Arcade to really be something special. Also, I’d love for the option to outright buy the games I really like.