Is Apple finally committed to the gaming industry?


New games coming in 2024 on Mac and other Apple platforms (Photo by Stephen Silver)

Apple has an absolutely dominant position in mobile gaming because of the ubiquity of the iPhone but a minuscule desktop market share. Apple has big plans for 2024, and we got a look at some of what’s coming.

Over the years, Apple has made quite a few moves to improve its position in gaming, especially for the Mac. Back in 2000, Microsoft took “Halo” out from under Apple.

Since then, Apple has occasionally made noises about boosting Mac gaming, but most have failed to amount to much. But ever since the launch of Apple Silicon in 2019, there have been rumblings that Apple is serious about it this time.

Then, at the June World Wide Developers Conference, Apple announced several moves to strengthen the company’s relevance in the gaming space, most of which were made possible by the Apple Silicon ecosystem.

These included announcing some high-profile new AAA games on Apple platforms, including Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows, 11 Bit Studios’ Frostpunk 2, Capcom’s Resident Evil 7 Biohazard, and PocketPair’s Palworld. Those games have already begun rolling out, with more coming in the second half of 2024.

Other gaming-related WWDC announcements included Personalized Spatial Audio for games, improvements to the Mac App Store for macOS Sequoia, and the introduction of Game Porting Toolkit 2 for developers, making it easier to port games from the Windows platform. Apple also began speaking at WWDC of a “Unified Gaming Platform,” which encourages developers to view the Apple ecosystem as one platform rather than three.

What’s next for Apple and gaming? And will this desktop gaming push succeed at a greater level than others have?

Where Apple stands

It’s unclear where Apple currently stands regarding gaming market share, and Apple does not release its own statistics. It’s been clear for years, though, that it absolutely commands the mobile space worldwide.

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