Well they're bringing AAA games like Resident Evil 4 Remake and Assassin's Creed Mirage to the iPhone, complete with raytracing support, so it looks like it'll be a golden age of Apple gaming soon enough.
Games made with a controller in mind are miserable experiences on a touchscreen. Phones are awkward and uncomfortable to hold like a controller, the lack of physical buttons provides no tactile feedback on where to press, the lack of shoulder buttons means overloading your thumbs with even more inputs, and your fingers obscure half the screen.
And if the implication is that they'll port those iOS games to Mac, then I wouldn't count on it if it takes even a single iota of extra effort on their end. There are more Linux gamers than Mac gamers, and yet game devs still can't be arsed to test their games on Steam Deck.
I don't think they expect people to seriously play Resident Evil 4 with touch controls. I imagine most people who actually complete the game will use either the controllers that attach to the side of the phone like a Switch, controllers that have a mount on top to hold the phone, a normal Bluetooth controls like a Dualshock with their phone in some other dock, or stream everything to an Apple TV.
I have been surprised they have not been more aggressive with the chips in AppleTV and signed more deals to port games to the platform. In some ways Apple is well positioned to be a player in the game space, but they seem to lack the commitment and flexibility required to make it work.
Apple has historically been terrible about committing to gaming which has led to game developers ignoring the platform. I do hope that Apple actually stays the course this time around and with the M* series of chips they've raised the floor for what game developers can count on having available.
I really thought they would have made a bigger play for gaming on the Apple TV (The hardware, not the app, not the service, I still can't get over that...), they pushed a little at the start but with most Apple gaming initiatives (aside from mobile) it seems to have fizzled out.
Which is why you can stream your iPhone to a TV and connect a controller. There are also many controllers that clip onto the iPhone itself for a Switch-like experience.
> And if the implication is that they'll port those iOS games to Mac, then I wouldn't count on it if it takes even a single iota of extra effort on their end
The games will come to all Apple Silicon devices as the architectures are very similar if not the same (M1 iPad vs M1 Mac). Apple also released the Game Porting Toolkit and I can already play games at decent framerates with Whisky [0] which utilizes GPTK. Keep in mind this is basically beta software that's not even for the end user to use but as a developer tool to help port their games over.
And obviously the games when on iOS won't be played with touch controls, it's for playing with a Bluetooth controller.
iPhone could be a legit game console if developers wanted it to. Pair a Bluetooth game controller with screen mirroring and there you go. There are so many games on Steam I wish they would port to iPhone. It's like having this incredibly powerful device in your pocket and you can't actually use it for anything.
