Apple Arcade is still around, adding 20 new games – and some of them sound good

Apple Arcade is still around, and it’s still a priority – at least that’s the message we imagine Apple’s surprise launch of 20 new games on the same day is trying to send.

The new games include (but are not limited to) a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles branded fighter TMNT splintered fatecalled a Disney-themed Scrabble-like game enchanted developed in collaboration with a Words With Friends co-creator called a city builder Cityscapes: Sim Builderand a sequel to the Arcade hit What the Gulf? titled What the car? (If you haven’t played What the Gulf? still, you probably should – it’s now available on other platforms as well.)

There are also a few updated versions of classic premium games from earlier eras of iPhone gaming, such as LIMBO, Kingdom two crowns, Farming simulator 20, Octodad: most paternal catch, Run Templeand Bennett Foddy’s Get over it-think Apple’s equivalent of a TV streaming service that also offers episodes of classic TV shows The office or Star Trek.

It’s the biggest catch we’ve seen for Arcade in a long time. The service has been getting more power lately, with one or a small handful of games here and there.

As in Apple Arcade’s recent past, the content strategy here seems to be to try to take the best ideas and talent from the open App Store marketplace and use them to prove that the idea that “mobile games are bad are” completely wrong – in part by paying attention to quality to counter the problem of mobile’s signal-to-noise ratio on that front, and in part by stripping games of microtransactions – even in genres that initially centered around that model for generation of revenues were developed.

Apple correctly diagnosed that the reputation problem of mobile games stems from the inability of users to wade through a lot of bad games (whether they’re bad because the content itself is bad or because the monetization sabotages what would otherwise be a good experience). are) for the good stuff. There were always good mobile games; users simply struggled to find them, and many threw up their hands and stopped trying after too many bad experiences in the process.

Still, Apple Arcade’s growth has been limited, in part because the claim that “mobile games are bad” was always wrong to begin with. There are hundreds of excellent mobile games on both iOS and Android, including many free-to-play games with reasonable and non-intrusive earnings — so many that it may have proven difficult to upsell iPhone owners for even Arcade’s ultra-cheap $4.99 per month price label. If there are already a dozen games you already enjoy, and they’re all free, why pay $5 a month for others?

Essentially, what Apple offers here is a management service. Arcade is like having a personal shopper for mobile games; you don’t have to spend hours trying mediocre games on the App Store and Googling to figure out where to start. You can just join Arcade and expect a certain minimum level of quality. But you could argue that the same people who desire great mobile games enough to pay a monthly fee for them are often the same people who were already willing to do the work themselves.

However, Apple Arcade isn’t the only game subscription service to do this. There’s also Netflix Games, which has grown rapidly over the past year, displacing titles from popular iOS developers. That includes some who used to post their new games on Arcade, such as Alto’s Odyssey developer Snowman, who launched the new game Laya’s Horizon on Netflix this week.

Games like Laya’s Horizon are playable on the iPhone and downloadable from the App Store, but you need a Netflix subscription to play. Lately, Netflix Games have been generating more buzz among influencers and the press than what Apple has released on Arcade.

Of course, media buzz doesn’t necessarily equate to success, and neither Apple nor Netflix have publicly released many details about the performance of individual games.

While Apple Arcade got some buzz early after its launch in 2019, reports in the following months suggested Apple struggled to gain as much ground with it as it would like, and much of the buzz died down. The company is probably hoping that this new barrage of games will spark some interest again, but the competition is fierce so we’ll have to wait and see.