I question if Apple really cares about or is serious about gaming. My impression is they use it as an excuse to showcase hardware improvements since games are happy to soak up pretty much any hardware that's thrown at it.
That seems to be where their concern for gaming stops. There is Apple Arcade, but it feels like the least amount they could do for the size of their company.
I do think they care about it over the longer-term, particularly in light Vision Pro and their overall AR strategy.
Apple is making 30%, just like all the console makers and Steam, on every single game transaction on iPhone.
What you're forgetting, and pushing aside, is that the mobile gaming market is as big as the traditional gaming market. All the phone games make as much money as all the consoles and PC gaming together. Apple, with its command of all the valuable phone customers, is pulling an estimated 14 billion dollars in 2021 in mobile gaming. So Apple is very dumb if they don't care about 14 billion in annual services revenue.
What you're thinking is that traditional gaming is big-boy gaming and where the big bucks are. The growth market is mobile gaming, with the other segments being stagnant outside of big hits. The reality is that Apple is a bigger gaming company, by revenue, than Microsoft or Sony, is controlling the growth sector, and is thinking accordingly. They have financed all on their own a new GPU generation for their phone and justified it as a need for gaming and gaming alone. Those other companies need partners, like AMD or Nvidia, to make them GPUs.
> The reality is that Apple is a bigger gaming company, by revenue, than Microsoft or Sony
The "reality" is that Apple still has to pay other studios to port games to their systems. We spent 8 tragic years watching them wheel out Tomb Raider demos each keynote as if it was a shiny new release. Larian Studios came, Blizzard Studios went, but nobody changed the tide of gaming on iPhone or Mac. The fact that Boom Beach is more profitable than dear esther is not exactly an allegorical victory for Apple.
So... here we are. A world where a $300, 20nm Nintendo Switch is a better gaming console than a shiny new $800 3nm iPhone. Apple's service revenue isn't driven by good games, so they have no incentive to build a better system. The entire iOS runtime is an antitrust meltdown waiting to happen.
So Apple's making more profit than Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony in gaming and somehow they're doing it wrong? You're right that the Mac is a horrible gaming platform. But we're talking profits here. Apple's bread is buttered on the iPhone side, and that's where Apple is looking. They're trying to get the Mac to gain steam, but it's clearly very difficult and their heart's not in it.
In the end it's a business, whoever makes the most money is the market leader. Until the government steps in. You are right that antitrust action is the most credible threat to Apple's positon in gaming. The fact the leadership at Apple has not moved an inch to satisfy governments will be Tim Cook's black mark on his tenure.
As much as I want this cesspool to die, unfortunately, parent is talking about revenue. And there I can imagine mobile market being even bigger than traditional gaming. All those shitty casinos and gacha games should rot in hell.
Based on the last two events, they increasingly invest more and more money into games. And to be honest, it absolutely makes sense — apple’s biggest competitor in many areas is themselves: people use their iphones for many many years. So it does makes sense to invest into services as well.
Gaming has a high cost of entry. Xbox posted its first profit in 2007, six years after the Xbox launch.
I would imagine that they don’t think they have much to bring to the table that would leaps and bounds get them over the current competition; their entry point would probably look like a premium Steam Deck or maybe the Vision Pro for AR gaming, but is that an Apple-sized market to sink their teeth into? Particularly when none of their other devices are traditional-gaming oriented.
That seems to be where their concern for gaming stops. There is Apple Arcade, but it feels like the least amount they could do for the size of their company.
I do think they care about it over the longer-term, particularly in light Vision Pro and their overall AR strategy.