Apple’s gaming ambitions continue to march forward

While Mac Gaming is significantly less popular than Windows, Apple’s overarching gaming strategy is still ambitious, and when you look at gaming on Apple hardware as a whole, it paints an impressive picture. Apple has gained an advantage with its chip hardware offering impressive performance on iPhones, iPads and Macs, letting Apple run games natively on all of its platforms. This multi-device strategy is similar to Microsoft’s Xbox anywhere proposal, but while Microsoft is banking on cloud streaming, Apple is trying to use brute force to run games offline.

For Apple it all starts with iPhone and the mobile phone is the Trojan horse of the whole operation. As a kid I played a ton of games on my iPod Touch, and then on iPhone after that, so I don’t have anything against mobile gaming. Over the past two years, with AAA games like Assassin’s Creed and Resident Evil coming to iPhone, I feel like we’re so close to my ultimate gaming dream coming true.

I want to be able to play a game on my console or PC, and then on the go, continue playing it on my phone. Sure, you can do this with game streaming via Game Pass or some other online game streaming services, but I’d rather play titles locally, ensuring that even when I’m travelling on a plane or somewhere without service, I can still continue to play. There aren’t many games that can do this, but last summer, when I was playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure, it was so convenient to be able to play on my phone while camping and then also play on an iPad or my Apple TV when at home. The relatively new video game emulator Delta also supports cloud saves, and it’s amazing being able to play Pokémon on the go, and then continue my save at home with a controller in the Vision Pro headset.

This dream is getting closer to reality all the time, and at a recent Apple gaming event, I got to go hands-on with some new titles that are coming out for iPhone and a variety of other platforms, and they looked stunning. I got to play an early build of Infinity Nikki on iPhone and the graphics on display blew me away. It felt almost on par with a game from the Xbox One/PS4 generation, which was jaw-dropping on such a small device like an iPhone. It definitely looks better running on the PS5, but I was blown away by how detailed and expansive it was on the iPhone.

This overall strategy also seems to be working on a second front: the Mac. Ever since Apple introduced the M-series of chips in 2020 the company has packed more and more powerful GPUs into its hardware. Even the base model M4 is a pretty substantial gaming powerhouse and can play games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and at the event I was able to demo the upcoming release of Remedy’s Control across the full suite of M4 chips and it ran amazing on all of them.

Control Ultimate Edition will be coming to Mac in 2024. 🔻

Optimized for Apple silicon Macs, with support for HDR and MetalFX Upscaling, and for hardware-accelerated ray tracing on Macs with the latest M3 family of chips. #ControlRemedy pic.twitter.com/rSbr0WpKhO

— FBC: Firebreak 🔻 Control (@ControlRemedy) June 10, 2024

I’m really hoping that as Apple continues to make great computers with increasingly solid value propositions, the Mac market share will start to grow again, and with it, more developers will start to make their games playable on the platform. Apple has done a lot to make it easy to port games over to the Mac with the Game Porting Toolkit, but it will take a solid increase in market share to really convince developers that it’s worth it to bring their games over. That being said, Apple has a secret weapon because all of its modern computers are pretty competent gaming machines, whereas on Windows, the market is a little more fractured between low-end workplace laptops and more expensive gaming-capable machines.

In a perfect world, Apple’s level-playing field, that’s also closely tied to the iPhone and iPad, would be more appealing for devs since, in theory, it should make it easier for a single game to hit a substantial audience. However, things don’t always work out that way, and the only thing Apple can do is try to work with developers to bring over a few big-name games per year to help break down the stigma that Macs aren’t good for gaming. The hardware was the easy part, but convincing developers and the gaming audience that Macs are a great place to play will be significantly harder.