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Apple Arcade Launches Two New Games and Previews More Games Coming Soon
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The irony is the Kingdom Rush games began life as... Flash games. The original Kingdom Rush was available for Mac (and PC, and everything else) before it existed for iOS.
Because good-looking games cost a massive amount of money and iPhone 'gamers' either don't exist or won't pay up.
I've been playing Huntdown recently, which is a truly great, retro game, with perfect old-school arcade gameplay with an actual difficulty curve like a real game. On Steam it's about $20 and has about 900 overwhelmingly positive reviews. On iOS it's about $8 and has less than a dozen reviews. That's nothing to do with the chips. It's either the cheapskate users, or the design of the App Store or both. Maybe we'll find out what the problem was if ever Apple is forced to allow Steam on iOS.
never will happen. apple doesn't support their gaming frameworks much. the features in third party engines are tenfold what xcode offers. scenekit doesn't even have an animation bone editor. you can't even import baked animations properly. it doesn't even have animation branching.
That is disappointing, one never knows what time will do, but it doesn’t look promising.
it's pretty sad. i develop games in xcode but i socialize with many game developers and i'm the only one that uses xcode. the stigma that macs aren't for gaming extends to development.
to sway developers apple needs to at least make development cross platform. every engine, including the small open source ones can compile to any platform except for xcode so really other than being an apple loyalist, there is no incentive to develop in xcode.
microsot captured game dev and even software dev with .net. many games on mac and ios have a .net translation layer for libraries used in popular engines and it could have been swift instead if apple threw in their support for windows like microsoft did for mac.
I did not try, but I assume its similar to AppleMusic: You will be presented with a "subscription necessary" message.
Huntdown is great. I've played it on a iPad Air 2 (A8X) and it runs at 60 frames per second without skipping a beat. I guess it's made in Unity.
Interesting. And sad.
At least Apple did this last year: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/07/11/metal-developer-tools-windows/
So there seem to be some kind of incentive to get more games onto Apple's platform.
Could they be getting ready to unleash a true gaming focused Apple TV at long last ?
I don’t see Apple users as cheapskates. Conflicting priorities and lack of vision is the problem. Apple TV can simply be way much better than the Switch, but it’s not a priority for Apple. Same goes for iPhones.
Cool.
Forgot to mention how much I love the backdrops in Huntdown. They trigger atmospheric emotions in me.
The popularity of free to play games (pay to win or advert based) seems to indicate at least some Apple product owners are.
They will eventually. People shouldn't expect anything until after the transition to Apple silicon is over by at least a year or two. Once all of Apple's products run their own GPU's, we'll see Apple FINALLY make a real attempt at getting gaming on their platforms. And by "real" I mean they are going to have to (co)develop their own gaming engine and possibly produce their own games at first. Developers aren't going put the effort in until there's proof that there's a real market for it. And before we see a "gaming" Apple TV, there's going to need to be a library of games available for it.
Remember that 'good-looking' is subjective. There's a substantial market for low resolution games, people who really admire pixel art. Then there's what some people consider triple-A with more realism etc that cost loads more to produce. Cuphead was illustrated by hand. If you're an indie team under ten devs it's unlikely you can get the 'best-looking' graphics. While I don't think Ketchapp games should be on Arcade, these and Clash, Candy Crush are what I think of when I hear mobile gaming... Not exactly the pinnacle of good-lucking in my opinion.
If Apple can make a GPU and CPU solution that has a considerably lower power consumption than what's out there I think they are more or less obliged to use their hardware for more "heavy" games too.
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Some games I was planning to buy so I’m quite happy. I hope to see some new entries too, higher end ones.
It has been just over two years since the launch of Apple Arcade, and the subscription-based gaming service's catalog continues to grow. Two new games were released on Apple Arcade today, with an additional two coming soon.
The latest additions to Apple Arcade include the classic arcade shooting game Galaga Wars from Bandai Namco and the popular tower defense game Kingdom Rush Frontiers from Ironhide Game Studio. Both games were already available on the App Store, but the Apple Arcade editions do not contain any in-app purchases or ads.
Galaga Wars+ is available on the iPhone and iPad, while Kingdom Rush Frontiers+ is available on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
A few new games have been listed as coming soon to Apple Arcade, including Splitter Critters, which Apple named the iPhone Game of the Year in 2017. In the game, players are tasked with splitting the world with a swipe of their finger and rearranging the split-up parts of the world to guide critters back to their spaceship. Metroidvania adventure game Dandara: Trials of Fear from Raw Fury is also coming soon to Apple Arcade.
Priced at $4.99 per month or $49.99 per year, Apple Arcade is a subscription-based service that provides access to a catalog of over 200 games across the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV, with additional titles added periodically.
Article Link: Apple Arcade Launches Two New Games and Previews More Games Coming Soon
I was kind of down on these rereleases but I actually think they are very nice now. I'd like to see more emphasis on making sure games play well on Mac though. It can sometimes feel like the Mac version is an afterthought.
Fully agree in this. Things such as not hiding the mouse/trackpad arrow cursor when appropriate and not offering a “quit” button to get out of the game from the GUI are two things that should be a simple fix, but are pretty common in the Mac version of Apple Arcade games.
Also missing some resolution options and anti-aliasing in many games.
It’s a paid service, so what do you expect? Oh, wait… ?
I was thinking of subscribing to Apple Arcade as I love strategy games as settlers. These games are not that demanding graphicswise. Somehow the level of the Arcade graphics made me turn away. If there are enough customers I don't see why revenue couldn't be incentive to high graphics devs to join the party.
You’re right, and there’s not currently enough customers. Once there are enough customers, we might see those games come. However, I think it’s more likely that some enterprising users will figure out how to improve the performance/functionality of Windows games on Mac to the point where users have less of a desire for games to be coded specifically for the Mac.
That's because iPhones, iPads, and Ipod Touches have all that raw power, doesn't mean it should make the full use of it. By doing so, you're limiting older devices that could've purchased or gotten in on your games. Even in PC gaming, they typically make games so that even "midlevel" computers can run them at minimum or "good" settings". Not too many PC gamers have bleeding edge hardware. It's also good to "scale down" since it'll use less battery and produce less heat. As mentioned in other posts, beautiful graphical assets take a much longer time to produce (read: time is $$). Also mentioned is for typical mobile markets, $5 really is the "impulse buy" price point, maybe $10 for a "better quality game". You really can't go too high else you're pricing yourself out of the market.
My question is, after you cancel or pause your subscription, is your game progressed saved (and if so, where?), or is it all wiped (so I can always resub and continue where I left off, assuming it's on the same device if the progress was local)?