To be clear, I have no idea how any other game subscription service works, so this might not be the first like this.
Also, I don’t necessarily think this would be worse than ad or IAP supported games, just somewhat different.
As much as I like my Apple products, I don’t see why I would want to do this. It’s not just that Apple needs to convince me they won’t half-ass it, but I don’t think the types of games I want to repeatedly play are on those platforms. Maybe I’m just in the habit of using the iPad only for consuming media, I dunno.
As for a news type of service, I might go for it, but my latest forays into Apple News almost always involve me getting annoyed at the full-page ads they seem to insert every paragraph or two in the stories I read. It’s such a terrible experience I don’t know that I’d pay for something unless it offered wide access to items and no (or very limited) ads.
Ok this confused me, so I just went and randomly clicked articles from many different sources. I don’t get that at all. On some pages I get the same little block ads you see in webpages, but even then, not that many. Do adblockers work in News? Maybe my adblocker is blocking them?
As it turns out I did have my ad blocker turned off. Turning it in on solved my issues.
On the subject of Apple and gaming though, my position is: fuck no. I don’t trust those guys for a moment, because they can’t even maintain compatibility across OS revisions. I’ve got an older iPad that can’t upgrade to a newer iOS version and I’m keeping this thing as long as it will stay alive because it’s got some games that never got updated and would disappear if I upgrade. I’ve got enough gaming options without Apple, I’m comfortable writing them off.
I am curious what iOS game was so great that you must hang on to this old iPad to play?
More than one, actually. Off the top of my head, they didn’t update Ultima IV or the Infocom text adventures, and I also have an astronomy app that doesn’t work anymore. That’s just off the top of my head, I have quite a few.
There is something ironic here about you being angry you can’t play 35 year old games on your iPad because the developer didn’t update them to 64 bit.
Yeah, there probably is, Lee. Good catch.
from what I have read, that’s how the Game Pass works on Xbox
Does anyone think it’s having an effect on game design?
Rumors are that Apple is funding development of the games in Apple Arcade, which essentially turns them into a dev studio. This makes sense, because it forces exclusivity.
What Apple needs to do is allow developers to make controllers mandatory. Modern iPhones and iPads have incredibly powerful guts; my iPad is markedly faster than an Xbox One S, but games are limited by requiring touch controls.
For me personally, there’s not one particular must-have game; as a game collector, I’m just annoyed at the general idea that I can upgrade my OS and a bunch of my games just stop working altogether. It’s a travesty and I wish that Apple would stop it. There should be a way to play old games in some sort of compatibility mode so they’re not lost forever.
I would assume that Apple would be paying based on actual gameplay time, not making a system where developers can make more money just by making their games load more slowly.
And part of the justification for this service was to promote quality mobile games that might not otherwise be able to support a normal up-front cost. So if this encourages those types of games, with actual development effort, I’m all for it.
I’m don’t really dig that a game is going to be playable across all apple platforms. I would think it might bring up mobile games a bit but it would certainly bring down games designed for a Mac that they would also have to be playable on an iPhone. At least that’s how I’m interpreting what they’re announcing. Still, I’m mostly on board for this sort of GaaS (I have Xbox and EA subs). I’m just not sure any of the games for this are gonna be my cup of tea. But we will see.
Apple Arcade just made me remember “Sky”, the game from ThatGameCompany announced in 2017. Was that quietly canceled at some point, or is it still in theory a thing that exists and might be released someday, somewhere?
Well they did stop it. The 32 bit purge is done and over and won’t happen again. Outside of a the few I lost then, iOS updates haven’t broken any of my apps in recent years. Not saying it doesn’t still happen, but it’s not as common as it used to be.
iOS is still relatively new anyway. It took Microsoft decades to get there. It used to be every new version of DOS, and then Windows, would break games left and right, and those were expensive games. Apple is getting there themselves, it just takes time.
Not sure why you’d consider that a rumor. The person on stage said as much. I’m sure they’re not funding the development of every game they showed, but I guess those who publish exclusively on Apple Arcade (as in: no PC/console version or timed/full exclusive) are likely to have received some support.
Did they? I was micturating through part of that presentation.
My understanding was that every single title in Apple Arcade was exclusive. Is it that they’ll have both exclusives and non? That would be fine too.
This. When I heard the Apple Arcade announcement, I flashed back to many an Apple keynote where they touted the Apple TV as a new type of gaming console. And then they f’ed it all up with the initial mess of spotty controller requirements. A game couldn’t make a controller mandatory first, and there was none bundled with the Apple TV (even as an option) so… No real game developers came to play for any significant amount of time. No Fortnite (which can clearly run on iOS), no Minecraft Bedrock version… And so on.