Apple and Gaming

[Honeybog]

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Replace the Gear Club Stradale icon with Solitaire City* and this screenshot accurately captures gaming on my phone.

*which still receives updates after something like 15 years(!) with no additional monetization

 

[Honeybog]

The conclusion makes sense in a way. It’s amazing that an iPhone can play a current AAA console game,* but how many people actually want that? Playing anything with modern graphics on an iPhone feels like playing Genesis games on a Sega Nomad: “Wow it’s amazing that I can play a console game on this, but it burns through battery so fast that it needs to be plugged in, anyway.” And that’s before you get into how poor the experience can be trying to play something designed for a controller on a touch screen.

If Apple is doing it for the press, that kind of makes sense, since bringing in a handful of expensive AAA games doesn’t address the real problem with games on iOS, which is that almost no one outside of IAP meme game makers is bothering with iOS as a platform.**

It kind of seemed like Apple was going to try and address that with Arcade, but then they abandoned any pretensions of that in the last year or two and now they mostly just add IAP meme games without the IAP.

*With the caveat that I tried the free trial of AC and had about 5 crashes on my 15P. I’m sure they’ll fix those eventually, but that doesn’t exactly make people want to pony up $50.

**Feral and a handful of Steam devs being the exception.

 

[Honeybog]

Honestly, it’s the games.

It’s FIFA. It’s COD. It’s NBA. It’s Madden. Forza. Gran Turismo. F1. These are the franchises with the colossal, pick-up-and-play appeal to reach many, many potential Apple-owning soon-to-be-gamers.

Case in point: there are two different COD games ranked 14 and 25 on the games top chart. As far as I can tell, RE: Village isn’t ranked (even on the genre charts) and AC: Mirage is #183 on the roleplaying chart.

top of that they made no effort to adapt to touchscreens (not that I’m convinced that was even realistically possible for games with such complex multi-input controls).

I’d say it’s possible. Hitman: Blood Money is a masterclass in this. It’s genuinely impressive how well Feral handled porting the controls.

And it’s the Mac that has actual potential. I’ve said before that I still find it utterly bizarre how much of an orphan Mac gaming is given its customer base.

Part of it has to be the Mac AppStore, too. I can’t imagine buying a game through the AppStore if it’s also available through Steam or GOG.

 

[Honeybog]

This article (via MacRumors) has some brutal developer complaints about working with Apple on Apple Arcade.

Our sources told us:

• Some studios now wait up to six months to get paid, which almost put one indie dev out of business
• The Apple Arcade team do not respond to routine emails for weeks or even months, if they respond at all
• One developer who had semi-regular meetings with the tech giant said that “half the Apple team won’t turn up and when they do they have no idea what’s going on and can’t answer our questions”
• Apple’s tech support was also described as “miserable” and “the worst I have seen anywhere”
• Vision Pro struggles to run “complex games” and developing for it is “like going back in time 10 years” due to the lack of tech support
• Apple engineers are “unable to offer any insights” into how Vision Pro’s hardware or software works, or “how essential middleware is meant to work with it”
• Discoverability on Arcade is so poor that one person said it was like their game “was in a morgue”
• Working with Apple is like being in an “abusive relationship”, said another

 

[Honeybog]

I think this faintly positive comment from the article basically sums it up:

One more sympathetic developer countered: “I think Arcade knows who its audience is much more today than at the outset. If that doesn’t turn out to be high concept artful indie games, that’s not Apple’s fault. If they can build a business on family games, good for them and good for the devs who can chase that opportunity.”

Which is pretty damning in and of itself. I don’t think anyone would fault Apple for going the casual family-friendly route like Nintendo, but Nintendo consistently puts out casual and family-friendly games that are also acclaimed and innovative. A lot of games in Apple Arcade’s catalogue seem like they were designed to test sea sponges for sentience.

 

[Honeybog]

AAA gaming on a mobile device where a fully charged battery will get burned through in an hour just seems like the wrong benchmark to be chasing.

I just want the selection on the AppStore to be a little less shit and with some effort to surface developers who aren’t predatory sociopaths.

On the nicer side of things, Solitaire City just received another update 16 years after launching on the AppStore, adding two more solitaire variations (bringing the total to over 70). It still costs the same $4.99 that it cost in 2008, has never had ads or in-app purchases, and the developer hasn’t even added a much deserved tip-jar. I assume it’s my most used app (apparently I’ve played 25,909 hands of solitaire in it).

I was chuffed to see that the update somehow helped it get to #2 on the paid “Casino” charts. It doesn’t rank at all on the overall top-200 games charts.

In terms of solitaire games that do rank in the top-200 of the overall charts, there are two gambling apps (sigh) and a solitaire game from (Apple Arcade partner) MobilityWare that offers a $2/month “premium” subscription that removes ads and offers access to “four exclusive themes.”

Frankly, I’d be really pleased if Apple stopped trotting people like Kojima and Miyamoto out at WWDC and instead made it even remotely easier to discover quality apps. In the case of Solitaire City, the only reason I ever found it was because it was released at a time when the AppStore had a reverse chronological list of the entire store catalogue.

 

[Honeybog]

Put me down in the “I don’t get it” camp. I’ve played Balatro a few times, but I can already tell I’ve got a handful plays left before I get bored with the randomness and starting over from scratch and uninstall it.

I’ve apparently played 26,001 games of solitaire on my phone, so I’m pretty confident I’d like this game way more if it was just poker dice* without all of the roguelike silliness bolted on.

*Actually, I’m positive I’d still be playing MotionX Poker if it didn’t die in the 32 bit purge.

 

[Honeybog]

And also how long development times are stretching out. Porting generates revenue when there’s no new titles for years at a time. And there are also third party developers it can be farmed out to leaving the main studios to original work.

Everything old is new again!

 

[Honeybog]

Any recommendations for some AS native games that aren't too large file size and are friendly for playing sans mouse (directly on laptop)? I recently upgraded to the Apple One family thing so have the Apple Games available. Looking for a ~time waster that I can fire up on an M1 MBA.

Not Apple Arcade, but my favorite time waster is The Long Dark. If you’re playing with wildlife set to peaceful, it’s perfect for a trackpad, runs great on an M1, and is surprisingly light on battery use.

I was going to make a post about it anyway, since it just had what’s probably its last big update, after 10(?) years. Supposedly, the developer is moving on to their next game, but I’m not going to hold my breath for future Mac support. It seems like a lot of developers who released things on Mac around the early 2010s gave up on Mac ports once it came time to roll out a new game.

 

[Honeybog]

Amazingly, as absolutely tragic as it is, Game Centre isn’t the lamest social thing Apple has ever done.

Remember Ping, in iTunes?

At least Ping didn’t constantly nag you to add your colleagues as friend and you could turn it off and it wouldn’t constantly nag you to log in.