Zarf Updates

(Previous posts on Apple Arcade: Sept 2019, July 2020.)

I bought a new iPhone SE last month. ("What's the smallest iPhone with TouchID? That one please.") This purchase comes with three free months of Apple Arcade. Oh yeah! I haven't looked at Arcade since my first trial month (late 2019). Or maybe I signed in once in 2020 to do some reviewing, but I didn't stick with it. So this is a good time to check back, right?

As of this writing, I still haven't pushed the "Redeem 3 Months Free" button. The game list just doesn't have much for me.

I talked about this in 2020 -- Apple's apparent shift of its Arcade strategy from "unique voices" to "grabby time sinks". I am interested in weird little narrative experiments and first-water puzzle gems. It seems like Apple no longer courts those titles. The "Puzzle" category under Arcade is strikingly thin. It's wall-to-wall familiar IPs like Monument Valley, Temple Run, and Tetris. You have to scroll down to the bottom to see the interesting stuff like Discolored and Manifold Garden, because they were added way back in 2019. (And I played them then.)

The "Adventure" category is better -- fewer stock IPs, more interesting concepts. (Gibbon and Wylde Flowers look cool.) But you still don't have to scroll far before you reach 2019.

Arcade's current strategy seems to be to find existing hits and invite them to create a "Plus" version. (Hidden Folks+, The Room 2+, and so on.) When I look at the "New Games" tab in Arcade, it's twelve "Plus" titles out of eighteen! Thirteen if you include a "Remastered".

The overall picture is a subscription service which wants me to replay my favorite old games forever. That's exactly what I don't want in my life. So I don't visit, not even to hunt for surprises.

Here's the problem: I've stopped visiting the non-subscription part of the App Store too.

For many years I had a regular ritual. Every week or two I'd pull up the "New Games" tab of the App Store and scroll down. Pretty regularly I'd see a nifty-looking puzzler or hidden-object game and blow a few bucks on it. That's how I got onto the Isoland series, Faraway, and innumerable grid-puzzle games like Pipe Push Paradise. I didn't find something every week, but I could scan through every single new title that hit the tab and at least think about it.

Somewhere in the last year, Apple broke the "New Games" tab. (Again, I'm talking about the main App Store, not Arcade.) It's now called "New This Week", and it's not new games; it's new updates. Oh, brand-new games still trickle in. But the tab is dominated by bugs-and-incremental updates by the giants who can afford to push new builds forever.

Looking at "New This Week" today, I see... Harry Potter, Star Trek, Hearthstone, Two Dots, Pokemon Go, Sky: Children of the Light, NBA Live, and ferchrissake Angry Birds 2. There might be one genuinely new release in here, but it's not worth tapping through the list to find it.

Effectively, new games no longer launch on iOS. As far as I'm concerned! New games happen on Steam -- that's where I look. (I never log into Epic any more, not even for freebies. As for Itch, I'm glad it exists, but I don't browse there.)

It's a pretty shocking shift from where we were ten years ago. I don't want to say "Apple has lost the thread", because (a) terrible cliche and (b) the market has grown by a ridiculous factor over that time. Revenue-wise, they've added about sixteen new App Stores to the one they had in 2012. Of course they're not all the same as the original! But it's still worth a headshake, or an eyebrow-raise, or something.