Apple Arcade's future: 🤩 or 💀?

Family-friendly focus makes indie game devs fear the worst.

Author

Lewis Wallace
February 26, 2024

In case you hadn’t noticed, family-friendly games based on popular franchises are taking over Apple Arcade. And that has some indie game developers feeling left out — and even wondering whether the service is doomed.

A new report, which quotes several anonymous game devs, sheds light on behind-the-scenes forces shaping the future of Apple’s subscription gaming service.

Focusing on kids’ games built around familiar characters like SpongeBob SquarePants might make Apple Arcade a convenient place for family gaming. However, these spurned indie devs fear it will snuff out creativity and doom the service to a slow death.

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— Lewis Wallace, managing editor

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Tweetz o’ the day

David Smith (@[email protected])

Attached: 4 images I love the immersive panoramas on visionOS. However, for this to be convincing you really need the photos to be high resolution. When I started printing large format panoramas for my walls, but still wanting to capture them on my iPhone, I had to learn how to maximize my pixels. I capture 48MP frames and then merge them in Photoshop. The result is the equivalent of Retina vs Non-Retina when viewed on visionOS—or “That’s nice" vs “Oh, wow I'm on a mountain top" Examples: https://www.david-smith.org/blog/2024/02/26/super-resolution-panoramas/

One more thing ...

❝

Clearly, iPhone plus iPod touch have created a new class of gaming…. It's a subset of casual gaming, but it's surprising how good some of the games are. And some of them are even approaching console gaming in their sophistication and graphics.

— Steve Jobs, 2010.

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