Apple’s gaming push is heating up faster than you think

A few years back, I was invited to meet with Apple about its new push into gaming. The company wouldn’t show me a flashy new product to enable that. Instead, it showed me something more modest: No Man’s Sky running smoothly on a MacBook. It looked great, but it wasn’t exactly earth-shattering. It was an independent game from 2016 running on a laptop as well as it had already been running for years on other PCs. I got the sense that I wasn’t there to cover a big development in tech, but rather to see a proof of concept that had bigger plans attached.

Years later, those plans are coming into focus even if they still aren’t fully realized yet. I recently attended a repeat of that showcase, only this time I wasn’t just watching an eight-year-old game running on a laptop. I demoed several games, including brand new ones, this time running on a range of devices including the MacBook Air M3 and a 13” iPad Pro M4. While we’re still a long ways away from the App Store being up to snuff with Steam on Windows, I’m starting to see where gaming on iOS is headed — and Apple is getting there faster than I expected.

Growing gaming

During my recent session with Apple, I’d get to see and play several games running across iPhone, iPad, and Macbooks. Some of those experiences are more exciting for Apple than for casual players. It’s neat that Resident Evil 7 can run well on an iPhone, but that’s not so surprising when I already know that the much more recent Resident Evil 4 does too. I’m happy to see games like Control and Valheim looking great, but those are existential wins for Apple as it seeks more partners to expand its gaming efforts. I don’t imagine that gamers are jumping to play games that have been out for years on an Apple device (and according to reports, they very much aren’t yet).

That’s not to say that what Apple is doing with those games isn’t impressive, though. One highlight of my session came when I got a look at Diablo Immortal running on the iPad Pro M4. On paper,