Since the service was announced in March 2019, I admit I’ve been kind of a stan for Apple Arcade. I will cop to being attracted to a service that promised a massive library of exclusive games subscribers could play for what essentially came out to free, that didn’t require its users to go out and buy new bespoke hardware for. If all you had was an iPhone, even an older one, for $5 a month even you could play Apple Arcade games – so went the promise.
The initial release of Apple Arcade gave us over 60 games on launch day. Titles like Sayonara Wild Hearts, What the Golf? and Grindstone quickly became the platform’s standout games, but there were dozens of games worth mentioning in the initial lineup: Assemble With Care, EarthNight, Mutazione and The Get Out Kids were all phenomenal, for example. But even as critics praised the service in the early days, many mentioned just how exhausting it was to sift through all those games at once – and lamented how, just because of the sheer volume of things to play, brilliant work was almost assuredly being left by the wayside.
It didn’t help that for the next few months, Apple Arcade fed subscribers a steady drip of new content: barely two weeks after launch, we got Pilgrims, from the folks who made Samorost; a week later, Stela, an apocalyptic platformer that drew comparisons to Inside; just a week after that, the incredible Manifold Garden. It continued like this until the first week of 2020, when the titles started tapering off.
By the time we had a chance to breathe we were met with a mountain of original games that ran the gamut from indie to AAA, from easy to challenging, and from “fully family-friendly” to “kids ask your parents.” Some of the games were clearly originally slated for the App Store but shorn of their free-to-play elements; these titles were harmless alternatives to the kind of game kids would ruin their parents’ bank accounts over. Others were clearly meant for PC or console before Apple got a hold of them. An argument started to formulate that “this is what mobile gaming could be, if not for all the garbage cluttering up the storefronts.” Apple Arcade became a walled garden within the dirtier, older walled garden of the App Store. (I want to be clear that this line of argument sucks, btw, and for both general reasons and specific reasons we’ll see shortly.)
Was every game a hit? No. But no platform has a 100% hit rate, and that’s just facts. What I can say is that deep into 2020, we were still getting a healthy balance of interesting – and worth-picking-up – indie titles, experiments from AAA studios, and the kind of premium-style mobile titles proponents of mobile gaming have been yelling about for years. I was utterly floored by South of the Circle, a beautiful, cinematic narrative adventure game from a studio whose previous titles included the aesthetically pleasing puzzle games INKS and KAMI. This is to say nothing of The Pathless, which got pushed out in November and almost immediately made everyone’s GOTY list.
This pattern of incredible games surrounded by interesting and memorable, if not particularly earth-shattering titles looked poised to continue well into this year. We got Alba: A Wildlife Adventure in December 2020, Oceanhorn: Chronos Dungeon and NUTS: A Surveillance Mystery in January, and Cozy Grove and Hitchhiker – A Mystery Game in March – all great games. April was shaping up to be particularly exciting because Apple announced that Hironobu Sakaguchi’s real-world diorama JRPG Fantasian was finally coming out, and soon. And I genuinely wish that I could finish this paragraph with the sentence “and things kept on going as they had been throughout the year, and it was great, and now Apple Arcade has over 200 good-to-phenomenal titles to play.”
Instead, alongside the announcement of Fantasian‘s pending drop, we also got news of a restructuring of sorts to Apple Arcade’s releases.
“Apple today announced it is introducing two entirely new game categories and adding more than 30 incredible titles to Apple Arcade,” the April 2 press release began. “In addition to new exclusive Arcade Originals, including ‘NBA 2K21 Arcade Edition,’ ‘Star Trek: Legends,’ and ‘The Oregon Trail,’ the service is introducing two new game categories, Timeless Classics and App Store Greats.”
“Timeless Classics” included games like Backgammon, Solitaire, Chess and Sudoku – literally classic games from before video games were a glimmer in anyone’s eye. And to be honest, that’s not such a big deal. Just about every platform, especially in the mobile/handheld space, has some kind of collection of “classic” games like this. App Store Greats is where the fly lands directly in the ointment, so to speak.
Basically, starting in April, Apple Arcade subscribers would be able to reach over the wall of their bespoke mobile game subscription service garden and play a selection of titles that were originally – and still are – available for money on the “rabble’s storefront,” the mainline App Store. Games like The Room Two, Reigns, Don’t Starve: Pocket Edition and Chameleon Run were immediately available for download, where previously it would have cost you around $12 for these exact titles on the App Store. You aren’t getting a particularly different experience with the Apple Arcade versions, either – a lot of the App Store Greats reuploads are simply that: reuploads. No new features, no rebalancing due to removed F2P mechanics, not even a graphical sprucing-up.
Here’s where I’m torn, lest anyone thinks I’m simply complaining about shit I got for free. The idea behind App Store Greats is kind of interesting, in a vacuum. There’s the discoverability angle: a lot of the games are older and are fairly well-past their popularity peak on the notoriously-competitive App Store, and newer generations of smartphone users may not have played these games. Additionally, if we think of Apple Arcade as being in the same vein as Game Pass, where you can “try before you buy,” then a lot of the titles in the program are sensible. And even better: no microtransactions and free-to-play mechanics means a safe place for younger kids to play crucial games without draining their parents’ wallets by accident. From these perspectives I can’t really shit on these games’ inclusion in this service that’s meant to be “fun for the whole family” and not just for disaffected 30-year-old game critics who have a bias for weird indie adventure games and JRPGs.
That being said.
If only the quality of Arcade Originals had held steady.
To date there have been 41 releases in the “App Store Greats” and “Timeless Classics” categories (including the initial April 2 launch). Many of the titles are at least interesting to play: there’s a Monster Hunter game in there, for example; there’s a Professor Layton sequel hanging out; one of my personal favorite games, Dandara, just dropped. Like, it’s not bleak, but if you already played these games when they came out, again, you’re not going to find much new here. In that same time period, we’ve gotten 32 Arcade Originals. Pretty respectable, right? That’s roughly three new games a month. What’s the problem? Surely, everyone’s getting their money’s worth, yeah?
I’m genuinely not so sure about this, even taking into account my own preferential biases. Here are the titles that are either scheduled to release before the end of the year or that have come out.
- Disney Melee Mania
- LEGO® Star Wars™: Castaways
- TRANSFORMERS: Tactical Arena
- NBA 2K22 Arcade Edition
- LEGO® Star Wars™ Battles
- Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls
- Temple Run: Puzzle Adventure
- Zookeeper World
- MasterChef: Let’s Cook!
- Zen Pinball Party
- Baldo
- Tetris® Beat
- Super Leap Day
- Detonation Racing
- Alto’s Odyssey: The Last City
- Angry Birds Reloaded
- Doodle God Universe
- Solitaire Stories
- Frenzic: Overtime
- Legends of Kingdom Rush – RPG
- CLAP HANZ GOLF
- Cut the Rope Remastered
- Fantasian
- NBA 2K21 Arcade Edition
- Simon’s Cat – Story Time
- SongPop Party
- Star Trek: Legends
- Taiko no Tatsujin Pop Tap Beat
- The Oregon Trail
- Wonderbox: The Adventure Maker
- World of Demons™
Two NBA 2K games within nine months of each other, a Castlevania mobile title that did so terribly in Canada it was disappeared for years before resurfacing here, a bunch of mobile mainstay remasters and match-3 spinoffs, a bad Platinumgames game (again, removed from Google Play like two years ago), the Oregon fucking Trail in 2021, and franchise tie-ins with Disney, LEGO, Star Wars, Star Trek and Transformers. I don’t know, man. I just don’t know.
There are absolutely good games on this list. I enjoyed the shit out of Fantasian and Taiko no Tatsujin Pop Tap Beat, and stuff like Detonation Racing and Baldo are at least worth checking out, even if they’re not my cup of tea. But comparatively, I just don’t know what these releases do for the platform compared to what came out in its first 20 months or so. Like, again, I need to stress this: not every game needs to be for me, and platforms need to be balanced for the widest possible audience. I absolutely get that. But Apple hasn’t made clear – and I’m sure they’ll refuse to do so moving forward – what balance is even supposed to look like in this case.
And there’s another wrinkle to this: a lot of the games that I would say defined the service in its early days (and were platform exclusives, to boot) have slowly, steadily been arriving on console and PC over the last two years. Where Cards Fall and Beyond a Steel Sky both just launched on the Switch, for example, for a premium price tag. With seemingly nothing on the horizon to look forward to and exclusives rapidly becoming less exclusive by the day, I genuinely don’t know how Apple plans on proceeding in the new year. My hope is that it remains just valuable enough to Apple where they keep pumping money into developers and we get to see some interesting titles come out amongst all the crummy brand deals and rehashes; my fear is that Apple is going to give up on the service entirely, leaving both developers and subscribers out to dry.
As of right now, there are only a few situations where I would recommend that people become new Apple Arcade subscribers: If they have kids who like playing games on their phones, this is a great service for them through Family Sharing; if you absolutely NEED to check out Fantasian (and I think you do) and have a free trial to Arcade available; if you want to experience App Store history through a very narrow, corporate-sanitized lens. If you fall into any of these camps, go for it. Otherwise, I don’t think it’s worth the $5 right now.