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Posts tagged with "games"

Game On: Pokémon Sleep, Stardew Valley+, Dead Cells, Netflix Gaming, Unity’s PolySpatial Beta, and Epic Games’ Battle with Apple

The videogame industry is huge, surpassing movies and music by wide margins. Apple has seen a lot of success with mobile games, but it’s history with desktop gaming leaves a lot to be desired. However, one thing is clear. Apple wants to expand its presence in the videogame industry and sees Apple silicon as the key to its success.

While the jury’s still out whether the company’s ambitions will succeed, beginning today, we’ll be publishing periodic roundups highlighting the biggest news in gaming on Apple’s platforms. From the iPhone and iPad to the Mac and Vision Pro, we’ll cover the big name games coming to Apple devices, along with notable industry and developer news.

What the Golf? running on visionOS. Source: [Unity](https://blog.unity.com/engine-platform/unity-support-for-visionos).

What the Golf? running on visionOS. Source: Unity.

This week, Unity announced a beta program for PolySpatial, a tool for visionOS developers that integrates with other Unity tools to help developers bring their Unity-based games to Apple Vision Pro. I wrote about the company’s announcement, which also revealed that Triband’s What the Golf? is being adapted for visionOS, earlier this week where you’ll find links to Unity’s blog post about PolySpatial and its beta program.

This week, I also covered a story by Lewis Gordon on The Ringer that takes an in-depth look at Netflix Games’ history and ambitions. It’s a fascinating look at a the video streaming company’s efforts to place a lot of small bets on mobile platforms like the iPhone and iPad, as well as console and PC gaming, in an effort to stay relevant to its subscribers.

Pokémon Sleep.

Pokémon Sleep.

There was big game news this week too. Pokémon Sleep, a gamified sleep tracking app from The Pokémon Company that’s been in development since at least 2019 debuted on iOS and Android. According to Ash Parish at The Verge:

Sleep works by having you place your phone on your pillow after doing any of the fifty ‘leven million Pokémon-themed activities you can do nowadays. (Back in my day, all we could do was catch ‘em all — all 151 of them — and we liked it!) The app purports to track your sleeping habits via your phone, and when you wake up in the morning, the app will tell you how well you slept and compare your sleeping style to that of other ‘mon.

If you think Pikachu might help you get a good night’s sleep, you can download the game from the App Store here.

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Netflix’s Slow and Steady Infiltration of the Videogame Industry→

Last week, The Ringer published an in-depth look at Netflix’s foray into videogame publishing, which, to this point, has primarily consisted of mobile games on iOS, iPadOS, and Android. The story goes back to 2017, when Netflix published a retro-style game tie-in with Stranger Things. Today, Netflix offers not only a sizeable and growing catalog of mobile games but has begun purchasing game studios like Night School, the makers of the critically acclaimed Oxenfree and the recently-released Oxenfree II. As Lewis Gordon, writing for The Ringer, explains:

Since acquiring Night School, Netflix has bought three additional existing studios outright; it has also established two, one in Helsinki and another in California. There are some 67 games in the Netflix library, playable through its iOS and Android apps; 86 more are in development, with 16 of those being made by in-house studios. Consequently, Netflix Games has swollen to 450 employees, headed up by VP of games Mike Verdu (a former Electronic Arts executive), VP of game studios Amir Rahimi (former president of mobile games company Scopely), and VP of external games Leanne Loombe (who joined from League of Legends developer Riot).

That’s a big catalog with an executive team in place that hints at Netflix’s long-term gaming ambitions. Gordon:

For the time being, Netflix is doggedly sticking to its mobile-first message: The company declined requests to interview Verdu and Rahimi, the two executives whose work will arguably bear fruit further down the line. Nor has it allowed access to anyone at its newly established studios in Helsinki or California, the latter of which is working on an all-new “AAA multiplatform game” led by game makers with considerable chops: Joseph Staten, a key creative on the Halo and Destiny franchises, and Chacko Sonny, former Overwatch executive producer.

However, it’s not clear where Netflix is heading. The company seems to be making a lot of smaller bets on multiple game categories, as Gordon explains:

Netflix’s mobile titles are a notably disparate bunch. Among others, they include a Hello Kitty rhythm game, a SpongeBob cooking game, and a handful of titles licensed from mobile juggernaut Gameloft, including arcade racer Asphalt Xtreme. There are mobile ports of prestige indies such as Kentucky Route Zero, Immortality, and Twelve Minutes, as well as a handful of similarly ambitious games that, if you were browsing for a TV show or movie, would be grouped under the “Only on Netflix” header: charming platformer Poinpy, open-world flying game Laya’s Horizon, and Ubisoft’s recent Valiant Hearts sequel. Finally, there are the adaptations of Netflix’s own IP: Too Hot to Handle, based on the salacious reality TV show; the aforementioned Stranger Things game; and Queen’s Gambit Chess, which will arrive on July 25.

Gordon contrasts this approach with Apple’s:

Apple Arcade, another mobile subscription service, initially cultivated a slate of titles that shared an elegant, refined aesthetic and innovative interactivity (from vaporwave rhythm game Sayonara Wild Hearts to mechanical tinkering simulation Assemble With Care) before pivoting to more casual titles in an effort to mitigate so-called “churn” (i.e., the loss of subscribers). Netflix, by contrast, has aimed for a broad audience from the get-go. After all, the company’s remit couldn’t be wider: “We want to entertain the world,” states the marketing spiel on its website, an ethos reflected in its TV shows and movies. For every Roma there is an Extraction; for every Mindhunter, a Love Is Blind. Now, for every Laya’s Horizon there is a match-3 Stranger Things game.

One aspect of Netflix’s approach that is very different from Apple Arcade that I find fascinating is that it’s purchasing videogame studios to complement its in-house studio. When you step back, it’s an approach that’s similar to Apple TV+, which is both funding third-party shows that it publishes on its TV+ service and Apple Originals, which are created in-house. Whether that’s a formula that Apple could replicate for videogames, I don’t know, but I’d sure like to see it try.

Another fascinating aspect of Netflix’s videogame business is its expansion beyond mobile games. The mobile games it publishes are free to play with a Netflix subscription, but others are being published and sold on consoles and PCs, too. A good example is the recent release of Oxenfree II, which can be played on Apple and Android hardware for free by Netflix subscribers, but it’s also being sold on consoles and PCs for $19.99. It’s an interesting approach that adds value to a Netflix subscription but also offers outlets to play for people who don’t subscribe or prefer console and PC gaming experiences.

There’s a lot in Gordon’s story to think about and digest. Today, the number of Netflix customers who are playing its mobile games is tiny compared to the total number of subscribers. At the same time, Netflix is still clearly experimenting and in the very early days of testing the videogame waters. As a result, it’s hard to judge where the experiments might lead, but in a rapidly changing industry, it will be interesting to see if Netflix’s approach is the one that sticks.

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The Case for Videogame and App Preservation

On the same day that the App Store turned 15, the Video Game History Foundation released a study that concludes 87% of all classic videogames released in the US are no longer commercially available. The study looked at a broad cross-section of platforms and found that this isn’t a problem that’s limited to one corner of the videogame industry. It’s universal. As a result, a large segment of videogame history is at risk of being lost forever.

The Video Game History Foundation’s mission is to preserve videogame history, and along with libraries, museums, and archives, they’re seeking exemptions from US Copyright law to make game preservation easier. On the other side of their efforts is the gaming industry, which argues, among other things, that commercial re-releases and remasters of classic games are satisfying preservation needs.

That debate is what prompted the Foundation’s study:

It’s true that there’s more games being re-released than even before. But then why does the gaming community believe that so few classic games are still available? What’s the real story here? If we want to have a productive conversation about game preservation, we need an accurate understanding of where things stand right now.

We conducted this study to settle the facts. It’s not enough just to have a hunch. We need hard data.

The results of the Video Game History Foundation’s study tell a different story than the one the videogame industry tells and is one that’s equally applicable to mobile games and apps on Apple’s App Store. Federico and I have written about app and game preservation before, including during the 10th anniversary of the App Store. And while I applaud Apple’s decision to promote classic iOS games as part of Apple Arcade, the Foundation’s study shows that it’s not enough. It’s a start, but for every game that is given a new lease on life as part of Arcade, there are dozens that lie dormant and unplayable.

The problem extends to apps too. Craig Grannell, with the help of Internet sleuths, set out to recreate the list of 500 apps and games that debuted on the App Store as its 15th anniversary approached. Grannell’s Google Spreadsheet currently lists 355 titles, and guess what? By my count, only 43 of those apps and games have live App Store URLs, which works out to 12%, almost exactly the same results as the Video Game History Foundation’s study. Grannell’s spreadsheet may not have been compiled as rigorously as the Foundation’s study, but the point stands: we’re losing access to culturally significant apps and games on the App Store alongside the videogame industry.

That’s why I was happy to see the Video Game History Foundation take the important step of gathering the facts that support their preservation efforts. Its focus is on games, but hopefully, it will help raise awareness about preserving apps too.

A good way to learn more about the Video Game History Foundation’s study is also to listen to the latest episode of its podcast, where Kelsey Lewin and Phil Salvador of the Foundation were joined by Brandon Butler, Director of Information Policy at the University of Virginia Library and Law and Policy Advisor at the Software Preservation Network.

Snazzy Labs on the Trouble with Mac Gaming→

Quinn Nelson of Snazzy Labs has an excellent video about the trouble with gaming on the Mac. The video’s title says it all: “Macs Can Game. But Apple Can’t.” As Nelson explains, it’s not the hardware or the software that’s holding the platform back. It’s the size of the Mac market and the lack of any apparent strategy to attract more than a few big-name game studios to the Mac.

Nelson’s critique is spot-on. More than ever, Apple seems to be interested in and care about gaming on the Mac. That’s gotten a lot of people’s hopes up, including mine, but the company needs to start spending money to get AAA games as exclusives on the platform if it ever wants to compete with the PC gaming market. Apple spent the money to go from Planet of the Apps to Ted Lasso, and it’s going to have to do the same with videogames if it wants to attract the industry’s biggest names and titles.

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Tears of the Kingdom Travel Guide Is the Ideal iPhone and iPad App to Keep Track of Your Zelda Adventures

TotK Travel Guide.

TotK Travel Guide.

If your summer’s going to be anything like mine, some of these things should sound familiar: you’re going to play around with the iOS and iPadOS 17 betas and get on some TestFlights for third-party apps; you’re going to spend some time at the beach or perhaps even travel abroad; and you’ll still be playing through The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which is a ridiculously massive game well worth waiting six years for. If the latter scenario applies to your life right now and in the near future, you’ll want to install TotK Travel Guide, which came out earlier this week for iPhone and iPad.

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Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit’s Support for DirectX 12 is a Big Deal for Gaming on the Mac→

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Earlier this week, I linked to Tom Warren’s story on The Verge about Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit and gamers’ early experiments with running Windows games on Apple silicon Macs running macOS Sonoma. Yesterday, Christina Warren, writing for Inverse, published an in-depth look at why Apple’s innocuously Game Porting Toolkit has the potential to be a big deal:

…buried in the keynote was a macOS feature that Apple should have called out with more fanfare: DirectX 12 support for macOS. As PC gamers already know, this software support means the floodgates are open for some real games — not that casual Apple Arcade stuff — on Mac. Maybe, just maybe, this is the beginning of the end to the old joke that Macs can’t play AAA games.

As Warren explains, Apple’s DirectX 12 support is thanks to a patch to Wine that the company developed:

That toolkit largely takes place as a 20,000 line of code patch to Wine, a compatibility layer designed to bring support for Windows games to platforms such as Linux, BSD, and macOS. Wine, which is primarily supported by the company CodeWeavers (which also makes a commercial version called CrossOver), works by converting system calls made to Windows APIs into calls that can be used by other operating systems. It isn’t emulation, but translation (an important semantic difference).

If this all sounds a lot like what Valve did with Proton and the Steam Deck, it’s because it is:

In some ways, the fate of Mac gaming mirrored another desktop platform: Linux. Like the Mac, and in spite of a very vocal contingent of users, Linux gaming largely remained largely elusive until Valve introduced Proton in 2018, a way to play Windows games on its Linux Steam client and on its Linux distribution SteamOS (which at the time, was primarily used for its failed Steam Machine devices). And notably, the open-source technology at the heart of Proton, is the same technology that Apple is using for its Game Porting Toolkit.

Does all of this mean that the Mac is on the cusp of becoming the AAA gaming platform that has eluded it for years? As Warren rightly notes, it’s too early to go that far, but it is cause for optimism and is a big deal even if it remains a niche way to play DirectX 12 games on a Mac.

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Apple Releases Developer Tools to Facilitate Porting Videogames to the Mac→

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

During the WWDC keynote, Apple showed off Game Mode for the Mac, which gives a game priority over a Mac’s CPU and GPU resources. Apple has also reduced the latency of AirPods used while gaming and doubled the sampling rate for connected Bluetooth controllers.

Game Mode promises to improve the overall experience of gaming on the Mac, but it’s not all that was announced at WWDC. Apple has also announced a series of developer tools designed to make it easier to port games to the Mac from other platforms.

Among those tools is a Game Porting Toolkit, which Tom Warren of The Verge says is:

 similar to the work Valve has done with Proton and the Steam Deck. It’s powered by source code from CrossOver, a Wine-based solution for running Windows games on macOS. Apple’s tool will instantly translate Windows games to run on macOS, allowing developers to launch an unmodified version of a Windows game on a Mac and see how well it runs before fully porting a game.

The Game Porting Toolkit is meant as a way for developers to quickly see how much work needs to be done to port their games to the Mac, but that hasn’t stopped gamers with developer accounts from downloading the tool and taking everything from Cyberpunk 2077 to Diablo IV for a spin on the Mac according to Warren.

Along with a tool to convert shaders and graphics code to Apple’s Metal framework, The Game Porting Toolkit and other announcements at WWDC mark a concerted effort by Apple to expand the catalog of games available to Mac users. Whether game developers will take advantage of these tools and bring their games to the Mac remains to be seen, but recent announcements that Stray and Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding, Director’s Cut are coming to the Mac are both good signs.

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Snowman’s Laya’s Horizon Takes Flight

There’s a lot to like about Laya’s Horizon, the brand-new mobile game from Snowman that’s available today on iOS, iPadOS, and Android via Netflix. However, it’s the game’s control scheme that elevates it to unique heights. Laya is by no means the first game to employ a simple two-finger control scheme. But, it’s the best I’ve tried, enabling a surprisingly deep and intimate gaming experience. Combined with Snowman’s excellent taste and attention to detail, Laya’s Horizon is incredibly fun and a game you won’t want to miss.

I got an early glimpse of Laya’s Horizon in early 2019, sitting on the floor of a Marriott in San Francisco during the Game Developer Conference. That feels like a lifetime ago, but it should give you a sense of how much work has gone into the game. What I saw in 2019 was a very early demo, but even watching someone else control the game, the sense of flight was palpable. With the game in my own hands, that sense became tangible instantly.

Laya’s Horizon is played in landscape orientation. You’re Laya, who has just earned her first cape for flying. The game kicks off with a tutorial that walks you through the mechanics of flying around its 3D map from a third-person perspective. Slide your thumbs down together to climb, up to dive, together for a boost of speed, apart to parachute down, and one up and the other down to bank left and right. It takes a bit of practice to get good at flying, but the tutorial does a nice job of walking you through the basics without overdoing it and becoming boring. As you play, if you seem to be struggling with a maneuver, on-screen reminders appear to help you along the path to mastering flight.

Opening up new areas of the map.

Opening up new areas of the map.

Those simple on-screen controls coupled with haptic feedback on the iPhone create a connection with what’s happening on the screen that’s remarkable. Before long, I found myself flying high over forests, diving into ravines, buzzing along the island’s shoreline, and bouncing off hot air balloons. There’s a lot more to Laya’s Horizon, but I expect that the simple act of flying around the game’s island will be more than enough of a hook to bring players back for more.

Aside from the joy of soaring through the sky, Laya’s Horizon offers a variety of challenges, races, and missions to level up your skills, collect new capes, and meet new islanders known as Windfolk. Alternating those activities with flying around the island, taking in the diverse scenery and enjoying the game’s excellent sound design and music, creates a soothing, relaxing experience reminiscent of Snowman’s Alto’s Adventure.

Diving down a mountainside.

Diving down a mountainside.

What’s very different from a game like Alto’s Adventure is that Laya’s Horizon is an open, 3D environment. The island’s map is revealed in stages as you explore and complete missions, opening up areas like the top of a mountain from which you can reach any other point. There are no restrictions on where you can travel, but missions and other activities are clearly marked, so there’s always something to do within your field of view as you explore. In all, there are 50 missions, 40 levels, and over 100 collectibles to find along the way, which is more than enough to keep you enjoying Laya’s Horizon for quite a while.

Races are one of my favorite parts of Laya’s Horizon. You’re shown the path from the finish line to the start and then compete with NPCs. Along the way are checkpoints you need to fly through, which act as loose directional signposts to keep you on the correct path. Flying close to the ground, through tight spots, and other risky maneuvers lets you collect sparks, which can be used to temporarily boost your speed during races, rewarding you for doing more than just floating above the fray.

Laya’s Horizon is a real treat to play. The game maintains a careful balance that allows players to dip into it for a short mission or get lost in its beauty for longer stretches. The result is a delightfully relaxing, fun-filled experience that I expect a lot of people will enjoy.

Laya’s Horizon is free to download from the App Store and play for anyone with a subscription to Netflix.

Six 8BitDo Controllers Add Support for Apple Hardware

Source: 8BitDo

Source: 8BitDo

8BitDo, a popular maker of game controllers, announced today that six of its products now officially support Apple hardware:

  • 8BitDo Ultimate Controller 2.4g
  • 8BitDo Pro 2
  • 8BitDo SN30 Pro +
  • 8BitDo Pro
  • 8BitDo SN30 Pro for Android
  • 8Bitdo Lite SE

The controller firmware update, which can be applied using the company’s Upgrade Tool, will allow gamers to use 8BitDo’s supported controllers wirelessly with any iOS, iPadOS, macOS, or tvOS game that has adopted Apple’s game controller APIs. Playing wired is also supported on iPads and Macs with USB-C ports.

According to 8BitDo, up to four controllers can be connected at once for games with multiplayer support, but rumble and motion control are not supported “for the moment,” suggesting that a future update may support those features. Links to detailed directions and illustrations of how to connect 8BitDo’s controllers are available by hovering over the images of the controllers on the company’s dedicated Apple device webpage.

I have a bunch of the controllers for which Apple device support was announced, and I can’t wait to try them. A couple of the controllers I have already have some basic support for Apple devices, thanks to compatibility with Sony and Microsoft controllers. However, the firmware update should extend the functionality of the controllers to the full set of features that Apple now supports.