Seven years after launching Apple Arcade in 2019, the mobile gaming service remains active alongside an accelerating broader push by Apple to bring premium games to iOS and iPadOS — efforts that include courting publishers such as Capcom for Mac releases and rolling out a proper gaming app. That work is now championed by Carson Oliver, the new head of App Store Worldwide, who told Polygon in his first interview since taking the role following Phil Schiller’s sudden departure this past August that Apple has no plans to slow its gaming ambitions.
This week, Apple launched Indie Hry Week, a seven-day event celebrating independent games on the store. The showcase welcomed Vampire Crawlers to iOS and announced an ambitious mobile version of No Man’s Sky, among other titles including Sifu and Little Kitty, Big City. At its center was Oliver, whose first act in the role — spearheading an indie gaming showcase — hints at where his priorities lie.
“From day one, the App Store was built to level the playing field for discovery and distribution, so that an indie title can sit shoulder-to-shoulder with the biggest entertainment franchises,” Oliver told Polygon in an email interview. Apple Arcade remains part of the plan, but his wider view points toward a future where the store could become as common a home for premium indie games as Steam.
Apple’s decade-long entry into gaming has been hard to pin down yet deceptively consistent. Since launching the experimental Apple Arcade, Oliver notes that gaming has “always” been central to the store and that strategy has evolved to meet players’ habits — but he attributes any recent aggressiveness to advances in hardware and software rather than a shift in intent.
“What’s accelerating today is the technology powering that ecosystem,” Oliver said. “We support developers on the App Store with far more than distribution. We continue to invest heavily in gaming: from new hardware technologies that deliver the highest sustained performance, like hardware-accelerated ray tracing to the A20 Pro and the next-generation vapor chamber in the iPhone 18 Pro; to developer tools, like Game Porting Toolkit 4, Metal, and our open-source Unity plug-ins.”
That confidence is backed by results. Hello Hry recently announced it will bring No Man’s Sky to iPhone and iPad later this month — a port that includes ten years of updates in roughly a 5GB game playable on an iPhone 11. Founder Sean
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