Apple Arcade adds new 'Timeless Classics' and 'App Store Greats' categories

AppleInsider

As part of its largest single expansion to date, Apple Arcade has added two new categories of games, featuring classics like "Sudoku," and hits such as "Monument Valley."

"Monument Valley" is now on Apple Arcade

Apple's subscription game service Apple Arcade has released its greatest number of additional titles since its launch in September 2019. Alongside 30 extra games, Apple Arcade now has two new categories, "Timeless Classics," and "App Store Greats."

"In its inaugural year, Apple Arcade won over media critics and fans for its creativity, diverse portfolio, and commitment to players' privacy, providing a safe gaming service to enjoy with family and friends," said Apple's App Store vice president, Matt Fischer, in a statement. "Today we're launching our biggest expansion since the service debuted... now offering more than 180 great games."

"Whether it's brand new games made exclusively for Arcade like 'NBA 2K21 Arcade Edition,' 'Star Trek: Legends,' and 'The Oregon Trail,' all-time App Store favorites like 'Monument Valley' and 'Threes!,' or traditional games like 'Chess' and 'Solitaire,'" he continued, "we have an incredible variety of gameplay experiences for everyone."

Timeless Classics

The new Timeless Classics category focuses on what Apple describes as "universally loved, quintessential genres" such as Backgammon, Sudoku and Solitaire. Now available on the service are versions of Chess and crosswords, too.

"Really Bad Chess" is an introduction to the game that adds random combinations of pieces. It's meant both to show how to use the knights, rooks, and so on, and to present a new challenge for existing players.

Apple says that the new "Tiny Crossword" comes with access to thousands of crossword puzzles. Not all are tiny, either, and their clues range across sports, movies, history and science.

App Store Greats

A highlight of the new App Store Greats category is "Monument Valley," previously a winner of an Apple Design Award. Its Apple Arcade version also includes the two subsequent game expansions, "Forgotten Shores," and "Ida's Dream."

Apple Arcade is a subscription service where the one monthly fee pays for access acrossiPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, and Apple TV. New buyers of any of these devices get three months of Apple Arcade for free, otherwise it costs $4.99 per month.

The game service is also included in each of the Apple One bundle tiers, which start with an individual plan at $14.95.

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DAalseth

This is very good news. A few more big drops like this and I might try it again. 

KBuffett

Apple really should have dominated the Gaming and Streaming markets by now. They seem to be going things by halves far too often now, rather like Google’s long list of failed offerings.

bloggerblog

Apple should regret the days they mistreated game developers like Halo. 

Having said that, Apple should buy Atari and their genuinely classic games. 

Japhey

I’d like to see Arcade broken off into its own separate app on the iPhone and iPad like it is on the Apple TV. 

The optimist in me is hoping that this upgrade is a prelude to a new ATV next week. Or the week after. Or the week after that…

asdasd

I’ll try again. Some of those are good. 

chasm

This will probably get me back in to Arcade, I enjoyed it very much but I finished the games I was interested in.

What I’d really like to see is a bunch of the best casual games from the 32-bit era brought back and updated, things like Bookworm and Diner Dash and some older but still well-regarded PC and Mac classics.

entropys

Marathon. You know you want it.

DAalseth

entropys said:

Marathon. You know you want it.

Marathon is in the AppStore, but I found the controls kludgy and the graphics really lousy. If they moved into Arcade and rebuilt the app with better controls and graphics I'd love to play it again. 

cloudguy

KBuffett said:

Apple really should have dominated the Gaming and Streaming markets by now. They seem to be going things by halves far too often now, rather like Google’s long list of failed offerings.

Please know that no top Apple executive has ever had much of a regard for video gaming. I don't blame them and neither should you. Study the video game industry and its history. Similar to Hollywood, video gaming is an industry that is very difficult to break into, extremely expensive to maintain traction in, yet ultimately isn't very lucrative. At all.

The top video gaming companies? Let's exclude Microsoft, who only gets a very small fraction of their profits from gaming. You have:
Sony (who gets a much bigger slice of their revenue from gaming than Microsoft but it is still a small part of what they do)\
Tencent (I don't like including them ... but no choice really)
Nintendo
Valve
Epic
Electronic Arts
Ubisoft

Don't you realize how comparatively tiny those companies are? Even if you take Sony and Tencent off the board, Apple could gobble the rest of them up with their spare pocket change.

I know, you are asking: "if video gaming is so unimportant why did Microsoft invest so much in it"? That goes back to the "learn video game history" part: Bill Gates got it into his head that consumers might start buying PlayStations instead of Windows PCs. I know, it makes absolutely no sense, but in his defense, it helps to remember that Sony was a huge deal back then - the world's leading consumer electronics company - and that PCs were way more expensive back then (where now a decent Chromebook costs less than a PS5). The more technical people at Microsoft had more legitimate concerns: that developers were going to abandon DirectX for the PS2 platform - which Sony originally intended to be used for more than gaming consoles - so Gates' paranoia was actually beneficial for their own purposes. But please note that neither Gates or the Microsoft tech architects ever cared about video gaming for its own sake. Why? Because there isn't a whole lot of money in it, and the money that does exist in it is extremely hard to make.

Google came to the same decision when they killed their Stadia studio: they would have needed to invest hundreds of millions in order to maybe make $1 billion years down the line. They'd make much more money easier and faster by expanding YouTube TV and making a Pixel phone that's actually decent (positive developments on towards both were announced this week). 

hexclock

entropys said:

Marathon. You know you want it.

Descent. 

elijahg

cloudguy said:

KBuffett said:

Apple really should have dominated the Gaming and Streaming markets by now. They seem to be going things by halves far too often now, rather like Google’s long list of failed offerings.

Please know that no top Apple executive has ever had much of a regard for video gaming. I don't blame them and neither should you. Study the video game industry and its history. Similar to Hollywood, video gaming is an industry that is very difficult to break into, extremely expensive to maintain traction in, yet ultimately isn't very lucrative. At all.

Don't you realize how comparatively tiny those companies are? Even if you take Sony and Tencent off the board, Apple could gobble the rest of them up with their spare pocket change.

You're right in that no Apple exec has had any regard to gaming, they have historically made it as hard as possible to write Mac games. They neglected to update OpenGL, refuse to use the more common Vulkan, refuse to fix bugs in GPU drivers, gamepad drivers, blocking Nvidia drivers entirely, etc.

Nintendo does pretty well, and they have a similar vertically integrated business model to Apple. And Apple has wasted spent $6bn in 2020 alone on AppleTV+, for what? They could have bought Ubisoft for $2bn more, which is actually profitable unlike AppleTV+ which Apple is throwing money at for essentially no return. Jobs' mantra was always that Apple should only get into a product category they could redefine or one that would push hardware sales, AppleTV+ is never going to redefine TV, it pushes zero hardware sales and makes no profit. TV is just as hard as gaming, there is no profit unless you have a hit or a decent back catalog no one will pay for the service. At least with Ubisoft for example they could have made the extremely popular Assassin's Creed games Mac only (though that'd never happen, Cook won't spend an extra penny more on the Mac than he has to) or iOS only. That is pretty much guaranteed success, and something that would drive hardware sales. OTOH essentially no one would buy Apple hardware to watch AppleTV+, even if it was exclusive.