Back when Apple Arcade launched in 2019, there was a resounding belief among gamers that the mobile gaming service wasn’t long for this world. After all, it was released during a time when major tech companies like Google were trying — and failing — to muscle their way into the gaming market any way they could. Seven years later, Apple Arcade hasn’t gone anywhere, and Apple itself hasn’t slowed its broader gaming efforts either.
Between courting major publishers like Capcom to release their games on Mac to launching a proper gaming app, it’s clear that Apple still has its sights set on being a major player. The latest example of that came this week as Apple launched an App Store event dubbed Indie Games Week. The week-long initiative saw Apple welcoming games like Vampire Crawlers to iOS and announcing an ambitious mobile version of No Man’s Sky.
At the center of that push was Carson Oliver, the new head of App Store Worldwide following Phil Schiller’s sudden departure from the role this past August. The fact that one of his first acts in the role was spearheading an indie gaming showcase hints at where Oliver’s priorities might lie. In his first interview since stepping into the role, Oliver told Polygon where Apple is currently at in its long journey to finding its position in gaming.
While Apple Arcade still seems to be part of the plan, Oliver’s more zoomed-out view signals a potential future where the App Store could become as commonplace a home for premium indie games as Steam. Apple’s push into gaming over the past decade has at times been hard to pin down, but also deceptively consistent. Since launching the experimental Apple Arcade, Apple has continued to poke at gaming from any angle it could find.
On a big picture level, Oliver notes that gaming has “always” been central to the App Store, and that Apple’s strategy has evolved over time to meet players’ habits and give them more choice. But if it feels like Apple is getting more aggressive in its pursuits these days, that’s a matter of tech. We continue to invest heavily in gaming: from new hardware technologies that deliver the highest sustained performance, like hardware-accelerated ray tracing to the A20 Pro and the next-generation vapor chamber in the iPhone 18 Pro; to developer tools, like Game Porting Toolkit 4, Metal, and our open-source Unity plug-ins.” That’s a lot of confident bravado stuffed with technical terminology, but there’s reason to believe that it’s not just corporate hype.
Hello Games recently announced that it will bring No Man’s Sky to iPhone and iPad later this month in a miracle port that includes all ten years of updates in a mere 5GB game that can run on an iPhone 11. When I spoke to Hello Games founder Sean Murray about the feat, he was quick to give credit to how powerful Apple’s devices have become over the past few years. Having a capable platform is part of the battle, but convincing developers to actually bring their games to it is no easy task.
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