Arcade fire
Apple responded directly to my recent Arcade report through The Guardian this week, but its defence doesn't stand up to much scrutiny.
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Apple doesn’t often get bad press, but in the post Epic Vs Apple world, it seems to be piling up. The many lawsuits and investigations into the App Store’s alleged monopoly haven’t helped, and its most recent hardware launch, Vision Pro, has not gone well.
It is also dealing with reports of lower iPhone shipments in China, getting heat for removing apps from its store at the request of the Chinese authorities, and just yesterday was accused by the Congolese government of using conflict minerals in its hardware. Check out the feed of Apple stories on the FT – it’s all bad news.
In that context, February’s report on Apple Arcade’s malaise is a blip on the wider Apple landscape, yet it apparently moved the tech giant to respond directly by giving a rare interview with The Guardian about it all.
The full piece is here and is really worth a read. What’s notable is that none of the claims made by my sources are refuted, really. And Arcade’s line-up of licensed kids games and repurposed App Store releases in the last few months further prove the points made in the original report.
In fact, Apple Arcade director Alex Rofman kind of lays the blame for declining developer payments on game-makers themselves for not making their games engaging enough. A bold move.
The interview doesn’t bat away the idea that Apple doesn’t care about or understand games very effectively, either. The claim that its ever more powerful chipsets are designed to play high-end games is a stretch, to say the least; Apple always wants its devices to be the fastest and most powerful on the market anyway, and games just happen to benefit from that. It is more of a happy coincidence than an active choice.
Moving the conversation onto Apple Vision Pro’s games capabilities is also strange. At launch, the tech giant clearly positioned the device as a productivity tool and media player first, and a games device a distant third.
There’s no firm denial or counter to anything in my report, frankly, and Apple’s attempt to assert that ‘games are more important than ever’ is very easily picked apart. Nothing has changed, unless that rumoured Arcade reboot is coming.
So I can’t help but think this attempted rebuttal backfired a bit. As a small independent publication I don’t want to get into a bunfight with one of the biggest tech companies in the world – I’m going to lose. But this attempt to undermine my work is pretty unpleasant, and I hope it ends here.
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