Hey Gamer, today we answer that age old question that will continue to be asked… until it’s 2024… is Apple Arcade worth it in 2023.

And the quick answer…yes, but I’ll get the “why” in a minute.

For those who don’t know, Apple Arcade is Apple’s premiere subscription gaming service launched in 2019. You pay $4.99 a month or 50 bucks a year and you have access to download any and or all of the nearly 300 games in the growing Apple Arcade library. Note that I said download, this is not a streaming service, once you download the individual games, you don’t have to be connected to the internet to play them. You can play all of the games on your iPhone or iPad And you can play on Mac or Apple TV if the game is mouse or controller supported.

Let’s get into some stats specific to 2023. In 2023, at the time of this recording, around 50 games have been released so far. Back in May, there was a huge drop of 20 games but other than that it’s a pretty steady drip of one new game a week. So if we keep on this pace we’ll be at a little over 60 games for this year.

The major perk to Apple Arcade to me is that the games are ad-free, I had stopped playing mobile games for a while because I had just gotten tired of the ads or freemium games that lure you in with a free game, but then you’ll soon hit a wall where you have pay for upgrades with in-app purchases where you then ultimately have to pay to win. And nobody wins that way… well I guess the developers do.

Anyway, Apple Arcade got rid of all that, no ads allowed, and if a game has been brought over from the App Store, most if not all DLC is now included with the game. Another plus is that Family Sharing applies to Apple Arcade. So you can invite up to 5 other people to have access to the subscription, which automatically gives you a pool of people to play with.

Now let’s look at the game options, because who cares how many games are available if they’re all crap, right? Here are Apple Arcade’s game categories and how many games are in each category, and I was actually surprised by this. I thought the ‘casual’ or ‘puzzle’ categories would have the highest count, but highest count actually goes to ‘action’ games with 50 games, with ‘puzzle’ in second with 37, followed by “adventure” with 35 games.

There’s more variety than I thought, and it’s not all shovelware either, there’s lots of ported hits like Limbo, Octodad, and Stardew Valley. There’s a lot of games with well known IPs too like Ninja Turtles, James Bond, and a bunch from Disney. While there’s still room for quirky indies like Getting Over It.

So let’s compare this to other game services to see how it stacks up. And I know, I know there’s going to be a lot of apple to oranges comparisons here, so let’s take all of this with a grain of salt, eh?

PlayStation Plus just hiked the price on all of their tiers and their lowest tier, Essentials, is now $80 bucks a year. With that, you get 2 or 3 games a month and online access. A lot of people have been complaining about the dropping quality of those monthly free games so a lot of them are dropping ship… myself included.

The Xbox Game Pass standard tier is currently $11 a month and you have access to hundreds of games. It’s one of the better services out there, with the only caveat of being that you have to own an Xbox if you don’t have a good gaming PC.

The basic Nintendo Switch Online plan is only $4 a month but that only gives you access to NES and Super NES games that are all now a good 30 plus years old.

The closest comparison is going to be Google Play Pass which is $5 a month and gives you access to nearly a thousand games. You’re not going to find any exclusives here, but there are the same perks of no ads. It all just comes down to what ecosystem that you’re in.

And now we have a new challenger, when Apple Arcade launched, it was touted as the ‘Netflix for Games’ but now we actually have Netflix Games. If you have a Netflix subscription already, you have access to the games of which there are only around 50 games now, but there’s some interesting Netflix IP exclusives in there like a Queen’s Gambit chess game or pixel art Stranger Things games. This is the one that I’m going to watch the most, they have the money to back it to make it work as long as they quit hiking up their subscriptions and getting hung up on sharing logins.

We’ll that’s it for today, be sure to like and subscribe, this channel is young and I really appreciate all of the support that I’ve been getting in these early days. If there’s a game out there that you want to see a review on, let me know in the comments.

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