How Apple Arcade Has Grown Quietly in the Shadow of Nintendo, Xbox and PlayStation

Interesting interview at CNET. A few key tidbits…

“We were defining a new category with the first gaming subscription service for mobile, desktop and living room, and challenged ourselves to launch with 100 brand new titles that would capture the quality and fun that we wanted the service to represent,” Matt Fischer, Apple’s vice president of the App Store, told CNET in an exclusive email interview.

Fischer said he believes Arcade debuted with more new games than any gaming service had launched with before, including heavy-hitters like Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus, EA Play and Nintendo Switch Online.

Q: One of the biggest criticisms around Apple Arcade is that the service doesn’t have a flagship exclusive game, like Halo on Xbox, Mario and Nintendo, etc. What’s Apple’s plan to attain a title that could be synonymous with the service?

One game that’s continued to grow in popularity on Apple Arcade is Sneaky Sasquatch from RAC7, a two-person team from Vancouver. It was one of our launch titles and has constantly evolved with regular updates throughout the years. The game has expanded into a much richer world with many new adventures and is consistently one of our top-performing titles. We hear from fans of the game from all over the world, of all ages, on how much they love Sneaky Sasquatch. We see a bright future ahead for Sneaky.

Q: Back in July, subscribers noticed about 15 games in a Leaving Soon category, which prompted questions about games being taken off of Apple Arcade. Those weren’t the first titles to leave the service, but it was a sizable portion of the overall catalog. How do you decide what gets taken off?

Fischer: Since the beginning of Apple Arcade, our vision has always been to evolve the catalog to provide players a continually new selection of fun games to play on all their favorite Apple devices including iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV. We launched the service with an unprecedented collection of over 100 new games and have since added more than 150 titles. We’ve also released more than 500 new content updates for existing games since the service launched.