Why Apple seems ambivalent to gaming

They don't care about games, they care about money.

Apple has its finger, albeit it’s pinky, in the games industry. It has Apple Arcade, it shows off games running on it’s Mac, iPads, and iPhones and when it does it talks about gaming like it’s a primary focus of theirs.

But then they go silent.

It leaves those who pay attention to these things confused, they get excited that gaming on Mac and iDevice is going to be a thing. It also leaves the rest of the Apple user base unaware. They have no clue that they have access to some really amazing games hidden behind Apple Arcade, and potentially don’t know that some games they want, or already own, will run fine on a Mac.

It feels disjointed and disingenuous, it feels like at any moment they are going to throw their hands up and shut it all down, like how Google treated Stadia.

But that’s not the case. Apple has very purposefully placed a very specific toe in the water, and doesn’t plan to pull out or put more in.

Gaming for Apple is right where they want it, because at this level it offers them maximum reward with minimal issues.

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Gaming in the Apple ecosystem makes Apple very rich. With a 30% cut of every micro transaction made from mobile games, Apple to rakes in millions of dollars every quarter from games they didn’t develop.

Apple has to do nothing, except maintain the App Store and operating system, and the cash just rolls in. In fact, there isn’t a meaningful thing Apple could do here to earn more. Even if they invested money in making really successful mobile games, it still would be cheaper to just sit back and continue to tax other peoples games.

So why does Apple pretend to be a gaming company once a year?

Two reasons, lock-in services and advertising.

Apple Arcade is a pretty simple way to get people to lock in to paying Apple a monthly fee. It’s known across the industry that people forget to cancel a subscription, it's mostly set and forget, which is why everything, including toilet paper, can be found via subscription. For minimal effort and advertising Apple has put into Arcade, they have enough of a sweet thing that it entices enough people.

We know it’s enough people, because Apple hardly advertises it.

Not to mention it’s also a tie in for Apples more expensive services plan, Apple One. If you’re one the fence about whether to buy services individually, or go for the bundle, Apple Arcade, and to the some effect Apple Fitness, serve as incentives to push you towards the more expensive option.

This is Apple’s perfected craft, everyone single one of their products is spaced out the perfect amount to get you to consider to upgrade to the next one. This is what they do well.

For context, Apple, in the Quarter ending June 2024, earned 24 billion dollars from services alone.

Gaming serves as a necessary marketing tool for Apple.

Every Apple device with a screen, on launch, will show someone playing games on it at some point in the marketing. It allows them to show that the device is a multipurpose device, giving you more reasons to buy one, and it allows them to show off their arbitrary benchmarks.

Benchmarks for the Apple processors are near useless now. No one else makes these chips, and so they are only self referential. So every year a new chip comes out and they get to say is 20% faster in jargon-filled-processing, and then they also follow up with 15% faster in graphics, like video processing and games.

This helps sell you, the viewer, on how amazing the device is, you’re being bombarded with things that sound better, and it helps convince you that you need the device. Even if you already have last years model.

Apple is very good, and I know this because it works on me, at convincing you to buy the new shiny, even though they are so good at making devices the one from four years ago will suit your needs.

Apple’s advertising is very good at convincing normal people who have normal needs, that they are professional content creators who will need that 20% improvement in screen, camera, processing, or graphical performance.

The games help sell the dream, Apple does not care if you actually play games.

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Let’s for a moment pretend that I’m not correct in the points I’m making. Let’s pretend that Apple really does care about gaming, and wants to do more.

What would they need to do?

Well they would need vastly improve the Metal graphical API.

For reference, the main API windows games use is DirectX which is on its 12th major version, which has been 22 years in the making or games can run on Vulkan which is about 10 years in the making. Metal is 2 years old, and is still missing a lot of features.

So Apple would need to complete about a decades worth of work in a short time, as well as address key concerns about developers being forced to use Xcode for porting.

Then after Apple has invested all that money into development, we have the obvious chicken and egg scenario, that people on Mac don’t play games, so developers don’t spend time and money porting to Apple.

So Apple has to overcome that, potentially investing more money into enticing major developers to make their games work on Mac.

We then have the hardware limitations of the ARM based M series chips, they aren’t exactly built to play AAA games at 4k, but actually surprisingly limp along quite convincingly (I’ve been playing NMS on my M3 Mac).

Then the next question is, how does Apple earn money from this? Because games need to be on Steam and Apple does not take a cut of that pie. They could force all games to be released through their Store, but that didn’t work for Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA, Rockstar, or CD Projekt Red.

You could argue that it could increase device sales, if people felt that gaming needs were being met on an Apple device, allowing them to forgo a windows gaming rig, but Apple already sells a lot of devices, about 65 billion dollars worth in the last quarter. How much more would they actually sell if Macs were a viable gaming platform? Would it be enough to warrant the investment?

That’s a lot of hassle, for really not a lot of return.

Then on the mobile side. Apple could put more advertising money into Apple Arcade, but would it move the needle enough? We don’t know how much money Apple Arcade made up of the 24 billion dollars of the recent quarter, we also don’t know how many people who do pay for it, actually use it enough. Apple knows, and they make their plans based on the data they have available. So something tells me it’s also not worth the hassle there.

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I understand the frustrations with Apple and gaming, I can’t stand Windows and I have games that can only be played on them (which is why the Steam Deck is a godsend), but Apple has no financial incentive to invest more into gaming, because they make a shit load of cash off of it in it’s current state.