Apple Hopes to Turn the Gaming Tides for Casual Gamers (Premium)

This week, at Apple’s hardware event, the company pulled back the final curtain on its gaming subscription service that the company is calling Arcade. Designed to simplify the gaming experience on the company’s hardware, it’s a bold step into the subscription service model that Tim Cook hopes will keep pushing the revenue needle higher.

The pitch is compelling on paper, for $5 a month, you have access to 100+ games, no advertisements, play across multiple (Apple) devices, and supports up to five family members. For those that are buying a lot of games on the app store, at $5 a month, Apple has a solid offering that is likely to entice more than a few people from its 1.4 billion active iOS devices.

But the question of who this subscription is targeting may present a few challenges. Historically, we have divided gamers into two categories, hardcore and casual. Hardcore gamers being those who have dedicated hardware for the purpose of gaming (gaming PC/console) and casual gamers who use things they already have, typically a phone or tablet. I fully embrace that this is not a perfect segmentation but for now, it works as a rough outline.

Currently, there are game subscription services from Microsoft with Gamepass, with Google, EA, and others working on an offering. Apple, unlike the other companies listed, is targeting the casual gamer, rather than the hardcore.

The question becomes, is that the category of gamer will to pay for a subscription? The argument Apple is making is quite compelling; they showcased several ‘snackable’ games that are quick to jump in/out of on your iPad/iPhone and they follow a similar graphics style and narration as a classic Nintendo game.

Apple is investing heavily into Arcade as developing a game is not cheap and at $5 a month, the only way Apple can ‘win’ with this service is with volume. While they do have a substantial userbase to pitch this offering to, if a sizeable portion does not subscribe, the funding for new titles will dry up quickly.

That being said, I think the key here is that you can have your family play all the games for $5 a month: this is a very smart move. If you have two or three kids, paying $60 a year and only letting your children download Arcade games is an easy way to control costs for the parents but also let the child have some freedom over choosing any game they want, as long as it’s black (Henry Ford, Model T joke here folks).

On the other side of the coin, I don’t think Apple will be attracting many hardcore gamers to its service. The most popular genre of games for hardcore gamers at this time is battle royal and all of those games, Fortnite, PUBG, Apex Legends, are all ‘free’ titles with microtransactions. Apple is not courting this audience with Arcade and is primarily going after the casual gamer.

The biggest threat Arcade poses to the market is for Nintendo. Nintendo has a rich history of targeting those who would not buy an Xbox or ...