Apple Is Doubling Down On Its Gaming Ambitions

When I moved to the United States, my parents bought their first Mac: an iBook G4. It was an absolutely devastating choice for me, personally, as it meant that I would not be able to play the newly released RTS game Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth, a title it had felt like I had been waiting a Third Age to play.

Now, 20 years later, Apple's gaming prospects look a lot different. Not only did the Mac move from a Power PC processor to Intel, it has now left those chips in the dust as well for Apple's own silicon. And of course, the iPhone launched, which not only revolutionized the mobile phone landscape, but the gaming industry as well; hundreds of millions of people have played titles like Candy Crush and Angry Birds.

At a showcase of games and devices that Apple put on for media last week in New York City, I got a chance to check out a selection of titles across the company's various hardware options, which put the reality of Apple's gaming prospects into focus. The company recognizes the potential, and it hopes that AAA video game experiences will catch fire on its hardware. What we were shown was a compelling argument as to how it would achieve that.

Before we took a look at any games that were built for the Mac, iPhone, or iPad, my group was shown Control running on a MacBook Pro via Crossover. Back in the day, when my family had that iBook G4, there were ways to get Windows and Windows games running on Mac hardware, but it was a massive hassle, to say the least. I remember trying to use software called Wine to make my Battle for Middle-earth dreams a reality and failing rather miserably.

Now, this kind of compatibility has become remarkably easy, with Crossover running the Windows version of Control via the Windows version of Steam, with graphics and ray tracing cranked all the way up, and getting a comfortably consistent 40+ frames per second. Control is eventually coming to Mac natively, but the team was showing how capable the Mac was now for gaming without developers needing to do any kind of optimization.

After going hands-on with this Windows version of Control, which admittedly felt just as good to play as it does on the various other hardware I've experienced it on, we checked out several games running natively on Mac, namely Valheim, Palworld, and Frostpunk 2. The upcoming release of macOS Sequoia is getting an updated version of Game Mode, which launched as a part of the current version of macOS Sonoma. This revised Game Mode, which kicks in automatically any time you boot up a game, is meant to more effectively reduce background processes and optimize computing power for improved gaming performance.

While Valheim on iMac and Palworld on MacBook Air seemed to run pretty smoothly, Frostpunk 2, which was running on a MacBook Pro, had some noticeable performance issues. I didn't get much hands-on time, particularly as I was at a loss at how to play the game just by sitting in front of it without any guidance, and I'm sure performance could have been improved via some settings tweaks, but it definitely stood out to me as the one example I saw there of a title that would be better experienced on a beefy PC. Time will tell when the game launches later this year.

We then moved over to a neat display of a MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro all running Resident Evil VII: Biohazard, and all idling at the moment when Ethan Winters first sets his eyes on the Baker estate, standing outside its gates. While the game performed great on the MacBook Pro with an M3 Max chip, and the latest M4 iPad Pro, I was most impressed by the game's performance on iPhone.

Typically, for these kinds of AAA games on the device, you have to sacrifice visual fidelity for performance and vice versa. I don't know whether Game Mode on iOS 18 was really that good, this build of the game was more recent than the one publicly available, or both, but to my eyes, the experience on the smaller screen was near indistinguishable from the one I had on the iPad and Mac sitting next to it. Granted, it was the opening moment of the game, which lacks the action that puts the hardware through its paces, but compared to running this exact intro on my iPhone 15 Pro Max without iOS 18 and Game Mode, there is a noticeable improvement with the upcoming software. Hopefully that boost carries into the more taxing set pieces later in the game.

However, the most impressive demo of the day had to be Diablo Immortal running on an M4 iPad Pro with ray tracing. The mobile game from Blizzard on Apple's latest tablet has been a point of contention among players, since the M4 iPad Pro has an ever-so-slightly larger display than the previous M-chip models, seemingly resulting in resolution issues on the new device because of that slight differential. Thankfully, this build of the game seemed to resolve that problem, but the improvements didn't stop there.

Diablo Immortal is one of the titles available on iOS that blurs the line between mobile and AAA, and this new update only further erodes that divide. The ray tracing upgrade visually transforms the game, bringing a level of depth and texture that I had yet to see in a title running on a mobile device. Ray tracing, which allows lighting to behave organically in games, bouncing off and interacting with the world as it would in real life, is not a new technology, but it feels like it is when looking at it on a device you can hold in your hand. Apple has highlighted ray tracing as a feature its new chips can support on several occasions in its keynotes, and actually going hands on with it makes you understand why; this tech is most impressive when it's mere inches away from you, and you can pick up the details better than sitting feet away from a TV or PC monitor.

While Apple is making the push to let players know that its ecosystem is becoming more friendly to a greater variety of gaming experiences, it's going to take some time to convince people that its devices can be used for more than a quick game of Monopoly Go. However, it may simply only be a matter of time. One of the most popular developers around right now, HoYoverse, makes games like Zenless Zone Zero and Genshin Impact with a mobile mindset at the forefront of their design. For other developers, porting games over to these devices is becoming easier as a byproduct of Apple's advancements in hardware and software– a tertiary benefit to the company's primary goals. Why not open these games up to a wider audience, particularly as growth in the console market seems to be stagnant, and players are displaying a preference for portability with successes like the Nintendo Switch and Valve's Steam Deck?

Recent news around iOS ports of games like Resident Evil VII or Assassin's Creed Mirage have involved reports that these are selling only thousands of copies, which, at first glance, you might think spells doom and gloom for the prospect of more console-level titles coming to the platform. However, as I said in my video where I took a look at Resident Evil Village on iPhone, that number will inevitably grow in a few years when these titles aren't locked behind only the most current and most expensive versions of Apple's devices. We're almost assuredly only months away from an iPhone 16 announcement, which, if it follows the trend set by the company's previous lineups, will have AAA game-capable chips across all of the various installments, not just the Pro flavoring.

This current console generation, now midway through its lifecycle, has had somewhat of a slow start, and toward the end of the decade, when the PlayStation 6 and the next Xbox launch, you may think twice about making the upgrade. However, you are eventually going to get a new phone, and even if that phone is an Android, those devices are making similar strides in chip technology. All this opens up the opportunity for these games to come to even more people's pockets, and potentially even their larger screens, as Apple’s own TV set top box is likely to get the same CPUs in future hardware revisions. Also, considering rumors are circulating that future consoles might move to ARM-based CPUs, which have a lot more in common with mobile processors compared to the x86 chips found in the current offerings, console manufacturers might unwittingly be making it easier for that transition to happen.

Numerous factors, from technological advancements and cultural behaviors to the COVID-19 pandemic and labor rights issues have upended the gaming industry in ways that were unpredictable not even a decade ago. The sales data shows that there is currently little interest from the consumer to make their phone their primary AAA gaming device, but as we’ve seen, that behavior could wildly change in a matter of years. And as publishers and developers are desperately looking for a new vein of growth, Apple is holding both its arms outstretched.