Apple Arcade, the tech giant’s game subscription service, has finally hit its promise of providing “over 100 games” to consumers. Steven Universe: Unleash the Light, Cartoon Network’s latest entry in the Steven Universe turn-based RPG franchise, came out last Wednesday, bringing Arcade’s grand total up to 101 games.
We likely won’t see another glut of games release at once like we saw during the service’s launch period, which is a relief for reviewers looking to keep their sanity along with their deadlines. But is anyone still talking about Arcade? Now that the tide has finally abated, it might be time to take a really good, sober look at this service and its portents.
Unanswered Questions
If we’re being totally honest, I think Arcade’s launch was botched. I don’t mean in a “this service is broken” way, but rather, “there are too many games to play at one time.” When you have a service appear literally out of nowhere with over 60 games ready to go, literally no one person is going to be able to play them all, even if you have the device capacity to download them all. So the first question I have is: “why did Apple choose to launch all of these games all at once, instead of stagger them out over a weekly release schedule like they did for the remaining 30+ games?”
I think I’ve managed to finish a total of six or seven Arcade games since the service launched. Games like Mutazione and Tangle Tower require a bit more of a time investment than the arcade-runner style of a game like Sayonara Wild Hearts. And when there’s a time investment involved, it kind of feels unfair to the other games that maybe won’t get their appropriate day in the sun until months from now, if ever.
I wasn’t the only person with this problem, either. Patrick Klepek, senior reporter at Vice Games, thought the sudden onslaught of games was a particularly odd modern problem.
“I downloaded everything at once!” he said to me in a Twitter direct message last month. “Everything that was available on day one, anyway. I’d wake up each morning, pluck away at a few of them, and realize I could never, ever spend meaningful time with all of them.”
This realization brings up another question: “how is games media reasonably able to cover all of these games? If they don’t cover all of them, how do they choose which games to cover and which ones to leave out?”
This question is important because there are very few truly terrible Apple Arcade games right now. It’s not a situation where the wheat could be reasonably separated from the chaff; it’s mostly wheat in here. Apple partnered with good game developers; it’s natural that the games that show up are mostly pretty good. So which games do we decide not to cover, and which ones do we put up on pedestals?
I think the answer to that is clear with this press release from Apple, naming Sayonara Wild Hearts its 2019 Arcade GOTY — an opinion I think we’re going to see aped in other media. After all, you could beat Sayonara Wild Hearts in an hour, with levels you could do while in the bathroom on break at work. Also, it’s neon. Can’t say any of that about a game like Mutazione, can you?
Do I sound bitter? Well, I kind of am, because these trends, and the media’s shaping of them, could directly help or hurt a studio’s bottom line. There were a LOT of indie games added to the Arcade stable, and there’s still a major question hanging in the air over their heads: “How are studios being paid for the content that gets put up on Arcade?”
The fact is, we don’t know. We have guesses, but those are educated at best and wildly off the mark at worst. The reporting on this exists, but is limited. Apple keeps very tight lips about these kinds of business transactions, and none of the developers working with the major tech firm are saying much either. I don’t want to say no major media outlet is working on this story because, who knows? Maybe someone is talking, but reporters can’t publish because it’s not the right time to do so.
Uncertain Future
I don’t know. We know that Apple has probably invested $500 million into Arcade, and that they made $13.5bn on the App Store alone in 2018, so maybe Apple is paying developers a full rate to develop their game and then giving them 100% royalties. Probably not.
But hey while we’re here: what does this mean for the actual App Store? You know, the app ecosystem full of free-to-play mobile clones-of-clones, peppered with genuinely good indie experiences and a tiny handful of major developer titles? The tangled mess Apple decided to drop its pristine walled garden right in the middle of?
I played… a lot of mobile games in 2019. Many of them were ports, like Heaven Will Be Mine, Dead Cells and Hyper Light Drifter. A few were pretty interesting originals, like Void Tyrant and Miyamoto. I know I had a good time with Farm Punks for a little bit, and Telling Lies came out on mobile at the same time as PC and console and I got that, so I should probably go back and check that game out. Very Little Nightmares was really good, but very hard.
And this isn’t even considering the above-average free-to-play games like Mario Kart: World Tour, Pokemon Masters or GUNDAM BATTLE: GUNPLA WARFARE – games I genuinely had fun with despite having to resist a constant tugging at my wallet every few minutes. The market is there for good mobile experiences outside of a curated gallery of boutique titles. But now that Arcade is here, will Apple continue to pay these games any attention? And more importantly, will customers? It’s a legitimate concern.
Mx. Medea over at RE:BIND made a great point last month in this piece about developer exploitation:
It isn’t hard to find article upon article on the effect that streaming services have had on musicians’ income, and while that industry is mechanically quite different to gaming – having to contend with record labels, contracts resplendent with legalese, and rights disputes aplenty – it starts to paint a relatively grim picture for the future of game development under a streaming-service model. Like all services, experiences, and artistic endeavours, streaming services create an ephemerality of that which they provide, moving from an artistic creation in the minds of the consumer to that of a consumable- a neatly packaged product to be ingested and discarded immediately thereafter unless it provides a mercenary skinner box or endless content eating expanding dev time ad infinitum.
So, what is a developer to do when the industry has decided to do a capitalism? When you spend your life making games, the answer for a lot of folx seems obvious: you game the system. There are plenty of simple ways to do so really; you can reduce stage sections in games to make them quick and easily digestible for someone playing your games on the bus, on their lunch break, etc., you can create a system that gives the illusion of infinite endorphin-dumping content, or you could embrace the core of games-as-a-service mentality and endlessly update your game to extend its life well past its initial release. Each of these choices, however, requires that you fundamentally tailor the game, or your approach to its development, with a view to ongoing engagement as opposed to its message, its themes, what you wish to convey, the core facets of the game’s artistry.
I can’t help but agree with Medea. The games on the App Store will continue to be there, but they’re going to have a hard time competing with the games that are in the Arcade. To win, or even just to break even, they’re probably going to have to lean even more steadily into the free-to-play, microtransaction-laden, “live service” models they have currently. We might all be a little bit poorer because of it.
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