Apple’s new gaming app: finally catching up to the party

[Music] All right, let's get into the headlines. So, from a market perspective, oh, Phil gave me this one. This is really interesting. So, this is like a kind of like a social media meets Steam kind of integration news. So, these kinds of platforms are things that I think are going to be like absolutely gamechanging and and Phil hopefully you agree is why you put it in here. So, Billy Billy is a Chinese video sharing platform. If you haven't heard of it, it's kind of like the animation geek culture YouTube plus Twitch of China. So, they are adding a onebutton Steam Wish listing soon. So, Phil, you found this post from Salva on LinkedIn. Are we going to agree that this is kind of like a PM plus a PMM's like acquisition dream?
This is huge. I actually think this is quite enormous news which is being buried. I think the Chinese pronunciation is bey.

It's YouTube. It's anime. It's basically otaku culture for the Chinese market. And this is how a lot of Chinese users discover games. And so the fact that there's going to be a oneclick ad to Steam wish list. It's exactly what you said. I mean, it's a dream for marketers. And this is the theme we keep going back to in the last two years on the podcast is the growth of Steam in China has been basically responsible for the line share of Steam's overall growth. The key question I have here, and I actually reached out to Zala, but I didn't get a comment in time for the podcast, is where is the wish list going? Is this going to the VPN Chinese Steam or is this going to the domestic steam that no one uses? And I would be fascinated if this went to the VPN steam because it feels like it's now just openly flagrant violation of Chinese law and everyone seems to be okay with it. The CCP is okay with it. You know, the CCP that called games the opium of the people. I'm very curious to see how this will play out, but I think this is really big news for user acquisition and the growth of Steam in China because I think this unlocks a lot of

performance-based marketing spend at least getting you to the wish list part of the funnel.
I hope our own platforms here in the west take note like if you know Valve and Steam, oh my god, can you imagine if you're in Tik Tok or some of these other apps and you this or even YouTube can you imagine going to YouTube and there was a one button press to download. Oh my god, it is a dream come true. All right, so let's go to the other platform that had some new news. Did you guys get an email from Apple? So Apple sent out the notification that their new Apple Games app is out. I saw it from my email. Then also we have a Polygon article that covered this. So So I love the title of the Polygon article. Apple's new gaming app is out and it includes features you'll swear you already had. Oh my god. Can I just like as an aside say I am an Apple user. I've been in the EOS. I am deep. I have every single possible thing that you can want. I just ordered two new Apple AirPod Pro 3s to

come and show up. I'm embarrassed right now to be an iPhone user because every one of the features that comes out from them is something that an Android user had 5 years ago. And please, if you are at Apple on the iPhone or other side, like let's start catching up and being innovative versus being a fast follow. Anyway, okay. So, the new games app came out with iOS 26, which is what launched on September 15th. I think it's rolling out slowly if you haven't already updated. I've been in the beta, so I've seen this for a while now. This was shown back at WWDC in June. So, if you remember, I think we showed an image of it was like Marvel Snap on, you know, the different devices. Good, you know, good on those guys for getting as the central image on that. So, the Apple's games app is a central hub for all games across the App Store, App Store, Arcade, and the Game Center. And this goes across all devices. So, it does go to Mac, it does go to phone. Dear Xbox, I

hope you're paying attention with your Xbox Anywhere. That only actually goes to two platforms and doesn't include mobile. Just side note, this also includes personal recommendations, easy access to previously downloaded games. So, this quote from the article was really interesting. The library tab won't just show you what games you currently have installed on your device, but every single game you've downloaded in the Apple ecosystem, including ones that have been delisted, looking at you, Flappy Bird. Social and engagement features also show up. They show you what friends are playing, offering leaderboards, event tracking, and game invites. I think you can actually do some sort of like custom challenges with your friends. I thought this also sounded interesting. Again, I'm a Mac user. The Mac version of the app comes with an extra trick. It will automatically show you all games installed on your computer, whether they are from the App Store, Steam, Gogg, or anywhere else. All of those games can be booted up from the Apple Games app directly, making it an all-in-one

launcher. Interesting. So, Crest, this looks like Apple Arcade subscription isn't going anywhere. Uh, and I'm not doing this to trigger an Apple Arcade rant, I promise. But what do you think about all of this?
You know, I I looked at it for a while last couple days. I I I think it's completely embedded with the new iOS 26. So, everyone should have access at this point if you've upgraded to iOS 26.
But so far, it looks like Apple is actually finally making an effort to do something positive for the gaming category. Okay, something nice.
I said it. Now I'm going have to burn myself, light myself on fire if we're saying something else to do.
But the app is like streamline, you know. I It does create an opportunity to create a real friends list, which obviously is a feature that's been around forever, but you know, and Game Center completely abandoned that for some reason. You can discover new in games, like you said. You can re-engage with old games, which is kind of cool for those that have churned out. You know, the arcade integration is there, which, you know, I'm not a huge fan of

to be honest, but certainly not good for third party, but I understand it. I get it. I know what they're coming from, right? They have events. They have achievements. I'm sure they have leaderboards. I mean, I it creates a platform that actually could be quite cool going forward, right? But I have to reiterate my previous rant from when this thing was announced. What the [ __ ] have they been doing the last 15 years, you know? Like why is it now that they're finally uncovering all these [ __ ] basic features that Game Center should have been evolving over time, you know? And I think it comes back to the same thing, right? They are up to something. They are totally up to something, right? This has nothing to do with gaming. This has something to do with protecting their ass on the 30% from every country in the free world that's suing their asses off. So, I don't know. So far so good, though. And on the flip side of this, this is showing quite an effort. like this is not something that is like trivial in terms of what they're building. You know, they are trying to provide some value for the publishers and maybe hopefully to fix some kind of dis, you

know, the discovery issues on the app store, which is a [ __ ] abomination still. You know, it might be a little bit too late. I'm not sure how customers will actually discover this app or use this app. Is this going to help them in the process of finding games? Are you going to go from advertising and push them into the gaming app versus the store app? I don't know. There's a lot of questions, right? I would love to see some CI as to like how the general consumer like
sees this app and how they use this app and or whether it is just a little bit too late and that people have already kind of like stuck in the rut of what they do in order to discover apps which is primarily likely by advertising on Facebook and app right so I think there's some potential here but it is unclear what their motivations are and what the future plans will be so
I have like glass half full and then glass half empty. So the glass half full take would be that now you have all your games in one place and it's the low friction and most importantly you can see the old games. You remember that

game that you downloaded back on your iPhone what five or four that's all there if you download it you'd be like why the hell did I play ever this game? There's social features, there's challenges, so that that could be a a sleeper head. We don't know, but social is always powerful. The discovery seems to be better, so that might help with overlooked games. Like even now as we're looking at this, you know, top games played and very well surfaced. There is controller support. So the whole crossplatform play, like who hasn't played Delta Force on their computer with a controller? It works in the landscape and now it's I don't know. I'm not going to go glass half empty here. Anyways, so the games look good on a big screen and then the glass half empty take aka the Neil Long take would be that shout out to Neil Long of Mobile Gamer Biz. So feels like a game center dressed up, you know, friends, leaderboards, achievements, event tracking. There's nothing new in that. Like we had this before and of course

you don't have to do new if you do it what existed but better. The discovery part just like Phil is showing here. You know, it shows match masters, it shows Brawl Stars, it shows Clash Royale, so like ton of Supercell games. So, is this just the same thing? Where are they promoting their big games and Apple Arcade indies and then nobody else? Nobody in the middle, not and nobody who's smaller or who didn't publish with Apple Arcade. For developers, it seems like this is, you know, a bunch of new hoops that you have to jump through in order to get that coveted featuring that Apple will hold for you. And then once you get that coveted feature, is it going to be the same as it has been for a decade? A poor organic traffic. It's just, you know, it just blows your KPIs. And it feels also just like anything Apple does, a way to force hardware updates because this is their liquid glass thing, their transparency effects,

the animation richness. It's just like get the new iPhone, don't get the iPhone Air cuz it's it's weak, but get the the Pro [ __ ] 2000. Anyways, I do have to also agree with with Crest on the 30% defense against the other 30%. I know we're going to talk about Stash later than this episode because if you're a conspiracy theorist like we all here are on this podcast. It's corporate conspiracy theorists. You put all your games into one app and you take it from everywhere else and say in this app only Apple Pay works. So no third party payment options. And that would be the conspiracy theory of this new app that has games because under a single app you can you don't have to enforce that. So that could be it or not. We're just con conspiracy theorists. Phil, what do you think?
There's a couple structural things that I think are important to point out here. So remember, your app updates, including games, are still going to happen on the App Store app. So you don't get updates

through this app, which I think is really important. The key question is where are people going to start their discovery, right? And so this app is only relevant if people start their discovery on the games app and use the search bar within that app. That is the key question to me is how does this fit into the ecosystem? And so are people going to start discovering games through this app? Are they going to go back to the app store? It's it's unclear to me what the product management angle is, the fact that they decided to disambiguate these things.
The nice thing is the editorials are gone.
They're finally gone. And I think that the other piece here that I thought was really important that we we haven't quite talked about, the top lists are back, right? So remember they moved to the top grossing lists. They still had the top download lists. And now we get this game center top played games. Now I'm not quite sure what that means. I'm sure it's some measure of active users. And so that's a boon if you're sensor tower. And I'm very interested to see if sensor tower will do a press release. I'm very curious what this top played games means. But again, this goes back remember we were talking about the GameCraft podcast and a lot of Blake and

Mitch's theory around the top grossing charts being a huge doom loop because people were using it for discovery and then they were hacking UA. And so I'm very interested to see whether or not this is going to be powerful enough to reintroduce that behavior. All signs point to it won't be because I don't think people are going to engage in this side app. But that being said, like I agree with you guys, like it is nice for Apple to throw us the bone. My concern is that this could be negative for us because they're going to start to remove featuring from the App Store app, which is where all the discovery and impressions happen, and segment it into this. They're basically just shoving all the games people into a junk app. I actually think this could be negative depending on what the actual user interaction with it is. To your point, what does the CI look like for this? I think is going to be very very interesting.
I want to double down on on exactly what both of you are saying. And by the way, CI is consumer insights. If if you aren't following what that is, is I'm in the beta. So I've had this app for god a few months now. I don't understand the use case for it. And I am not directed

to engage in the player journey using this centralized app. So first when it downloads to your phone, it goes at the back of all of your apps. At least this is how I think about using my phone is my my first screen is like all the stuff that I use. And if you're on like the fourth or fifth like scroll, I like I'm almost never really going there. I just don't understand why I would go and think to make this part of my player journey and engaging my games and not going to directly to my games from a user acquisition standpoint. What drives me to this app to then see this and engage with this on the daily basis? You know, if I were them and I don't know how it works, like this still needs to be somehow like in the app store and that opens up inside of the app store itself, which is what you are trained to do. you're trying to ask a player to go on a different player journey than they've ever engaged in on the device. And so that's what I'm super worried about is if they're not going to market you and direct you to this funnel, then no one's going to go to this funnel.

I couldn't agree more. I think that the key will be all the social features, right? Like that's the USP that would drive people to the app is, oh, I have a new challenge. I have to open this app or, you know, I have a new achievement. I have to I just like I don't understand. Like, don't you just get that in the game that you're playing? Like I don't
I can see my achievements here.
Yeah,
I can see my achievements relative to global players. Remember that was really important for Steam data too. That's how we saw that like for instance Call of Duty single player completion rates were collapsing. This was a great RS Technica piece a couple years back. So like a lot of more data becomes visible. But I it's got to be those social features that that bring you back your friends list management. Anytime you think about opening Xbox, you might be opening this [Music]