Apple vs Games

Apple Arcade is in the news again, for not great reasons; as always, Tsai has the roundup, the but the short, short version is that Arcade is going exactly as well as all of Apple’s other video game–related efforts have gone for the last “since forever.”

My first take was that games might be the most notable place Apple’s “one guy at the top” structure falls down. Apple’s greatest strength and greatest weakness has always been that the whole company is laser focused on whatever the guy in charge cares about, and not much of anything else. Currently, that means that Apple’s priorities are, in no particular order, privacy, health, thin devices, operational efficiency, and, I guess, becoming “the new HBO.” Games aren’t anywhere near that list, and never have been. I understand the desire to keep everything flowing through one central point, and not to have siloed-off business units or what have you. On the other hand Bill Gates wasn’t a gamer either, but he knew to hire someone to be in charge of X-everything and leave them alone.

But then I remembered AppleTV+. Somehow, in a very short amount of time, Apple figured out how to be a production company, and made Ted Lasso, a new Fraggle Rock, some new Peanuts, and knocked out a Werner Herzog documentary for good measure. I refuse to believe that happened because Tim Apple was signing off on every production decision or script; they found the right people and enabled them correctly.

At this point, there’s just no excuse why AppleTV has something like Ted Lasso, and Apple Arcade doesn’t. There’s obvious questions like “why did I play Untitled Goose Game on my Switch instead of my Mac” and “why did they blow acquiring Bungie twice”. Why isn’t the Mac the premier game platform? Why? What’s the malfunction?