Apple and Gaming

Lots has been written about Apple and gaming, but there's a point that I don't think has been made.

Games are units of entertainment, not apps.

What do I mean by this? Well, think of a movie, or a song. These are produced, usually by teams of people who work on them for some amount of time, until they're done. They release them, and then they move on to the next thing.

When new formats come along, some units of entertainment get upgraded to support the new format, but most don't.

I'm talking about things like the transition from 1080P to 4K, or music adding spatial audio.

The job of the media player is to play the media, no matter what. The Mac can play any old song from the oldest MP3 to the newest AAC. Apple has always been a little finicky about video formats but I believe any format Apple has actually supported can still be played in the newest players.

Apple as a company often takes a stance where they do what they believe is right and expect the world to adapt. Removing Flash in Safari, for example, was a significant hit to the web at the time, and thousands of sites just stopped working.

Games aren't apps. When a game is done, the team moves on. Sometimes old games get updates but most of the time there's just nobody in place to update a game and push a new build to the stores.

A rule that games that haven't been updated in 2 years are moved from the App Store is a pretty clear sign that Apple doesn't think of games as units of entertainment, they think of games as software.

Apple doesn't see it as their job to keep old games working, that's up to the developers. This attitude wouldn't be tolerated with old music or old movies, and it shouldn't be accepted for games.