Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple CEO, and will be replaced by hardware chief John Ternus in September.
As Cook gets ready to become Apple’s executive chairman and take things a little easier, he can reflect with pride on a tenure which saw its share price skyrocket and the launch of hits like Apple Watch and AirPods. He also may not want to reflect for too long on the disastrous Apple Vision Pro, the already-forgotten HomePod or that infamous, ill-fated car project.
Still, the Wall Street narrative around Apple for much of Cook’s time in charge has actually been about its surging services revenue, driven by that juicy 30% Apple takes from every in-app purchase. And for a long time, that revenue mostly came from games.
It’s often forgotten that Apple is one of gaming’s largest platform holders, and the number of people playing games on iPhones and iPads easily outstrips those playing on PC and console combined.
And yes, while there are more Android phones out there in the wild, mobile players spend way more on IAPs on Apple devices. And so how Apple views games and operates in this industry really matters – just ask Tim Sweeney. But Apple is a company that has always kept the games business at arms’ length – even when, for a brief moment, Apple was the centre of the gaming world.
For a couple of hours in September 2016, it felt like Apple finally ‘got it’. Pokémon Go had been a worldwide phenomenon that summer, and landed a slot in Apple’s keynote alongside the iPhone 7 and Apple Watch 2. Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto even took the stage to announce Super Mario Run, one of very, very few firstparty Mario games ever released on non-Nintendo hardware.
But what followed was really a regression to the mean for Apple – a dismissive approach to game players and game-makers that’s evident in almost everything it has done in the games business from the very start.
Cook’s attitude to games is perhaps summarised best in this short passage of an interview with The Independent when he visited Ustwo Games in 2017. The reporter, likely only given access in exchange for softball questions like this, asks: ‘Are you a fan of Ustwo and Monument Valley?’.
Cook replies: “Most games are shoot-em-up or that kind of stuff. This one feels like there’s more of a core purpose kind of game.” Jesus. I mean, it’s barely even a coherent sentence. Just say yes, you are a fan of Ustwo and Monument Valley and i’m delighted to be here. Or yes, I played it on the plane over here and it’s great.
Instead, we get the suggestion that games as a whole are pretty pointless, and actually Cook can’t even be bothered to engage with a question about them, even when literally sat in a game studio.
Weary, oddly revealing interview nuggets aside, Cook’s legacy through the lens of games can be assessed through the company’s three biggest moments during his tenure: the launch of Apple Arcade, the removal of IDFA and its court battles with Epic (and its reaction to accusations of monopolistic practices by nations and courts around the world that followed).
That Apple Arcade launch in 2019 very much represented what Apple would like gaming to be on its platforms: 100 well-made games from credible developers with no ads, no in-app purchases and an eye for craft and design that (mostly) fits into Apple’s overall vibe.
And yet it’s pretty clear players didn’t really want those kind of games, and even if they did, Apple did a really, really terrible job of marketing them. After a couple of years, Apple stopped commissioning the more artsy, indie style original games, purged its catalogue of weak performers and focused on simpler, family-friendly titles.
There’s still a smattering of bangers on Arcade, sure, but they’re now outnumbered by repurposed free to play games from the ‘regular’ App Store which have been stripped of their ads and IAPs. It’s still a great service for families and younger players; but it did not ‘save’ gaming on Apple devices in the way the tech giant wanted it to.
Arcade’s existence is also perhaps more to do with getting more of that predictable, highly profitable services revenue than any genuine desire to run a ‘Netflix for games’-style service. One could argue it is actually a box-ticking exercise to add value and an extra bullet point to the Apple One subscription pitch, which includes things Apple cares about much more: iCloud storage and its music and TV services. To round out that proposition, it needed a games service of some sort, and Apple Arcade is it.
Later, the removal of IDFA shook mobile game marketing to its very core. It made getting the right games in front of the right player a much, much more difficult and expensive process, and is a true classic in the genre of Apple policy decisions that have huge negative repercussions for everyone but Apple. Although AppLovin later did pretty well out of it.
Industry chatter at the time suggested Apple knew exactly how apocalyptic ATT could be for mobile game-makers, but went ahead and did it anyway. Ultimately, it wasn’t quite the end of the world, but it certainly didn’t make marketing games any easier.
And then there’s that Epic trial. When Cook took to the stand to testify, we got the clearest indication yet that his company was happy to take its 30% cut but not really engage with exactly why so much money was flowing through the App Store and games like Fortnite.
Cook is “not a gamer” in his own words, and appeared to pay the role of clueless grandad when asked about how a very large chunk of his business, the App Store, operates.
Remarkably, he even pretended to not know whether the App Store is profitable or not. He had “a feeling” that it was, though – a pretty strong feeling, you’d imagine: Apple had reported all-time high services revenue a couple of weeks earlier. And remember, once again, that most of that services money is from games, though Apple never seems to mention that in earnings calls.
Since then, Apple has proven itself incredibly stubborn and contemptuous when dealing with demands to loosen its grip on the App Store – drawing up deliberately complex and confusing policies in response to new EU laws, as well as annoying a US judge so much with its shenanigans that she simply asked Apple to remove all payment restrictions from the US App Store.
Now Cook is moving aside, new CEO John Ternus will soon carry with him the hope that Apple finally wakes up to the benefits of reinvesting in a games ecosystem it has presided over like a contemptuous landlord until now.
And there is genuine hope. Ternus is a hardware guy; Cook was an operations guy. Games are the thing Apple uses to showcase the power of its hardware in keynotes – the hardware Ternus has helped create. And so maybe he’ll be more inclined to think and care about this stuff than Cook, who saw games as a bit of a waste of time, it seems – though he was obviously happy to pocket all the cash that came from them.
Elsewhere in the Apple hierarchy, there’s further cause for optimism. The old guard, who maybe didn’t grow up with games as part of their cultural diet, is gradually stepping down.
Uncompromising App Store overlord Phil Schiller is effectively retired, and his successor running things, Matt Fischer, left in August 2024. Carson Oliver and Ann Thai are now in charge, both of whom were once boots-on-the-ground App Store business managers whose job it was to listen to and help developers. They likely ‘get it’ way more than their predecessors ever did.
As for Cook, consider for a moment the Apple Games app. You know, the gaming hub that was launched with zero fanfare last year? The one that’s sitting untouched and ignored on billions of devices right now?
It seems to say everything about Tim Cook’s contribution to the games business over the last 15 years: perfunctory and soon to be forgotten.
