With the recent announcement of Google’s Stadia, Apple has also announced its plans to capitalize on the growing market of mobile gamers. Apple’s Arcade is the company’s newest endeavor, a subscription service for mobile gaming. The service will offer more than a hundred games at launch, and you have unfettered access to every game available in its library. None of the games will have in-app purchases, and you can more than likely play it across your multitude of Apple devices (if you’re into that sort of thing).
In order to bolster its efforts, a recent report from the Financial Times has stated that Apple has allotted a cool $1 billion solely dedicated to its streaming services, be it television and film, news partnerships, and now even video games. The report speculated that while a bulk of that money will most likely go to the more popular media streaming platform, it still leaves several hundreds of millions of dollars to go to buying out licenses for video games, as well as securing funding for developers to make games for Apple’s new streaming push.
These numbers are not surprising, since video games tend to have very large budgets and are generally very lucrative investments, but the fact that Apple is trying to break it into the video game market is something to look forward to. For one, this could change the way everyone looks at gaming on a Mac, which is limited as of now to a few titles, since the infrastructure of the macOS is vastly different from Windows, or even Linux. It’s also worth noting what kinds of games Apple will be able to secure, seeing as the tech company always goes for exclusivity. It will be more than likely that whatever game ends up on their Arcade service is going to be Apple exclusive.
However, it seems some developers are still keen to do timed exclusives, which is similar to what is happening now between some video games and the Epic Store, according to the report. It also speculates that if successful, Apple’s Arcade services may very well be a more lucrative venture than their previous streaming services for other media, seeing as the mobile gaming market as a whole is still quite young and untapped.
