What I think the Apple Games app needs to work – and why it won’t

The rumour mill is frothing about a dedicated Apple games app. Which, given Cupertino’s dearth of app-naming imagination, will presumably be called Apple Games. After hastily rebuilding an office wall I blew down due to sighing so heavily on hearing this news, I figured I should at least consider how Apple could make this work. And why it won’t. Because Apple.

Clearly, Apple Games would be intended as a statement, to convince gamers, developers and even Apple itself that the company is a market leader in this space and serious about games. Despite years of evidence to the contrary. It would also be a combination of launcher, games discovery engine, friends hub and leaderboards. Which sounds a lot like Game Centre, a once standalone app Apple forgot about and left broken for six months, before taping it back together and burying it so deep inside its operating systems that it now only appears when you sacrifice a ZX Spectrum on the night of a blood moon.

But, hey, Apple rakes in huge sums of cash from App Store games and services like Apple Arcade. So if Apple wants to make Apple Games work, here’s the minimum that it needs to do. 

1. Nail the basics

Achievements. Leaderboards. Social features. These aren’t bold innovations in gaming. They’re the bare minimum. If Apple execs rock up on stage and even remotely infer Apple invented any of these things, we should riot.

2. Highlight controller support

It’s 2025. If a fancy new Apple Games app can’t say whether Lara Croft: Guardian of Light will work with my Gamesir G8 or Backbone, it’s already failed. Just like the App Store, which will, bizarrely, instead denote the game’s position on the UK App Store Action chart, as if I or anyone else cares.

3. Add landscape support

Any iPhone in a controller means landscape orientation. That grinds against Apple’s portrait-mode iPhone app obsession, but I don’t want to crane my neck 90 degrees to launch a game, like I currently have to when using the iOS Home Screen.

4. Embrace openness (LOL)

Someone may have to break it to Apple execs that Apple Arcade isn’t all of gaming. Gamers should be able to pin and rapidly access third-party games – and ideally even tap into Steam, Xbox Cloud Gaming and Antstream Arcade. Otherwise Apple Games will be little more than an Apple Arcade app wearing comedy spectacles and a fake moustache.

5. Recommend good games

Apple editorial too often highlights IAP nightmares over legitimately good games, for some reason. No, hang on, for this reason: money. But gamers hate all that even more than 20-minute unskippable cutscenes. So: surface genuinely and objectively great games. Get smart game journos to help if need be. Easy.

6. Not get bored after 11 seconds

The big one. Apple has a bad track record with its own apps. Many launch in a blaze of glory, only to be caked in cobwebs a year later. If that’s Apple Games (as it was for Game Centre) , I’d sooner Apple would permanently leave its gaming ambitions in another castle.

Why Apple Games will fail

Even if Apple ticks a few boxes, it probably won’t tick enough. Because there’s no sense of gaming spirit, drive and commitment at Apple’s highest levels. Games are seen as cash generators, not culture. They’re benchmarking tools, rather than experiences – a way to show off the power of a new iPhone or Mac before quietly forgetting games exist for another year. 

I’d love to be wrong. But when I yet again hear Apple is getting excited about games, I get a pang of hope that’s instantly, mercilessly crushed under a 20-tonne weight of reality and history. So I want Apple Games to thrive and for this to be the year Apple finally cracks gaming. But I think there’s more chance that 2025 will be the year of Linux on the desktop.

• Related: Why I want Apple Arcade to include classic arcade games – and why that’ll never happen