Did Apple Lie About AAA iPhone Games? 

Apple keeps announcing every year that now they are serious about bringing AAA gaming to the Mac. And every year we get 1 or 2, usually old games released and that's it. Apple refuses to spend any of the 100+ billion dollars in cash they have to really bring AAA gaming to the Mac. They do it on the cheap and release a few tools, software updates and then tell game developers it's all up to them now. Unlike MS and Sony that pour 100s of millions and even billions into developing games every single year. Until Apple does something similar things will never change.

First AAA gaming on ios I experienced was gta vice city back in 2012.

Great video, Quinn!!! I always loved the writing for your scripts!

There are some gems in Apple Arcade. Stardew Valley, Sneaky Sasquatch, Fantasian, and Ocean Horn 2 are all really fun and worth the cost of an annual subscription IMO. The big problem with AAA games on mobile is the controls. No one wants to lug around an external controller, and the hassle of setting that up eliminates the convenience factor. You might as well buy a compact handheld PC for the cost and convenience, and get the power with it.

Couldn't agree more, as another Steam deck owner (also an LE!) I was amazed at running GTA4 at 90 FPS, the handheld gaming is just so much better than what any phone could offer for now. Though with that said, for more game developers to harness the GPT it would be interesting to see if any shift happens.

Another unbridled banger of a video just in time for christmas day. Please do not stop making videos. Please make more videos more often.

It's still ridiculous, with the cost of an iPhone I bought a gaming laptop that runs any AAA game in Ultra at more than 60 FPS

Great analysis on the port and market 👏🏻

Great video! It’s such an interesting topic…Apple and gaming. You have a great take and as things continue I would love to hear more. Until the next one!

One thing both ios and android have issues with is apps no longer maintaining support for the os, as brought up with the Bioshock situation. Granted that was an extreme case, but there are plenty of apps that are just inaccessible and unable to run on any modern device. Where as with PC, (not sure what the situation is on mac) I can go back 20-30 years or older and play games or run those applications outside of a VERY small handful that are usually due to some sort of DRM setup or something weird. Where as on android or ios, there are a lot of apps that are not even 10 years old, that just wont run due to incompatibility. That would be my concern with any type of big purchase mobile gaming. Guarantee backwards compatibility, and I might be sold.

I like how as I was typing we reached the same conclusion. If mobile gamers are disinterested to pay triple A prices for triple A games, then maybe offering a premium tier of Apple Arcade with access to these high budget titles might be the way to incentivize growing in this sector.

I really think that Apple needs to develop a switch like first party dock and controller mount. The power of the iPhone is insane but no one is going to take advantage of it while the gaming experience is pure jank. It needs the apple touch of integrating hardware with software. Otherwise we are only going to get shinier idle clickers on iphone.

Obligatory Infinity Blade 1/2/3 mention (and if you try the 60fps version...) I don't think you should need a controller, many good games were made 10 years ago with touch controls

This is great video Quinn! I love the take and 1000% agree!

It wasn't a console port but man I miss Infinity Blade 2

It's sad that the good mobile games from the late 00s until 2012 are gone. Were they complex? No, most of them not. But at least they played around with touch control, accelerometer etc. Even Gameloft made good games. Asphalt 4 is still my favorite racing game with a large variety of tuning and car options. A5 was already a significant step back in tuning, but had some nice tracks with shortcuts and motorcycles are no longer separated. Galaxy On Fire 2 is still today one of my most played game with over 200h. I remember that GoF 2 was with 11 CHF crazy expensive for an iPad app. Then it received two dlcs for 7 CHF each.

The big trouble I see with gaming with apple is the lack of maintaining older catalog. Square enix ported "the world ends with you" to the iPad. When I bought my ipad with apple pencil I was excited to play but couldn't find it on the app store. Just outright depressing.

Let it evolve and develop further. It’s just the first step by Apple, I’m sure by the time we have iPhone 17-18 these games will run absolutely perfectly

Maybe it isn’t amazing, but dead space on iOS was the first time I felt like I was playing a console game on mobile , sadly got discontinued on iOS 9

I like where the industry is heading. I'm not much of a traveler, but knowing that there's a move forward towards gaming on an iPhone is nice to hear. I used to play amazing games on iPhone back in the days of 3GS like Samurai II and it was amazing. Now having AAA games on iPhone, wow. That's another reason to upgrade to a PRO. Sure, the price is high, but its nice to have the alternative of gaming while traveling light or in holidays. I know I can't get my desktop PC with me.

Maybe Vision Pro will have the hardware needed to let you play the AAA on the “Big Screen” and pick up where you left off on your phone, and also have decent frame rates

Anti aliasing is a major issue even on MacOS try running X plane 12 at 2XAA it's not possible , FXAA is the only way, interesting video, thanks for all your videos this year, merry Christmas ❤

A clever review, congrats 😊

Yeah I gave up on gaming on Mac and iPhone years ago, even though Im a die hard apple guy and I have a 15PM and Mac Studio. I still much prefer my gaming pc and ROG Ally for gaming. I agree, I wouldn't spend AAA games prices on Mac/iPhone games.

Remember when Ubisoft announced Assassin’s Creed Mirage for iOS? Yea that never happened yet

My first AAA experience with MacOS was Unreal. Not Unreal Tournament 20xx, but Unreal version 1.0 in the 90s. And it was amazing on a hacked Diamond Monster 3D.

It’s worth noting that upscalers (at least the amd and nvidia variants) have and tend to improve drastically over time.

Love the beard. Looking like a true Burger King. Also, appreciate your opinion videos a lot. Good to have somebody who things for themselves

What if you add coolers for 15PM? Would the game(RE4:R) exceed 30fps limit?

I remember a little over a decade ago when pundits were claiming smartphones were going to make handhelds obsolete. And they almost did. It's one of the reasons why the Vita and 3DS struggled out the gate. But the problems with mobile today are still largely the same as they were back then. I remember when SquareEnix ported the Final Fantasy 3D remakes to iOS. People kicked up a fuss saying they were way too expensive. They were were going for $20 on the app store (if that), and were originally (IIRC) $40 on the DS. Touch screens are also arse for most games, so you need to buy a grip as well. Where as the Switch or Deck are both from established companies who are heavily invested in long term support, and offer a consistently decent experience out of the box. They're also seen as premium products, so people are willing to pay a higher price for games. I think the portable market has bifurcated to such a degree that mobile and handheld are just two completely different things now that cater to completely different people. It'll take a lot of work to convince the latter to switch to the former.

I think when people were discussing that they did single binary - they are meaning that the code is 99% shared between them. Just because it's a seperate App on each App Store doesn't mean it wasn't built as a Single Target in Xcode or even if it is a seperate target that it isn't just the same code.

My pet peeve is tech bloggers calling aliasing anti-aliasing, when they quite literally meant the opposite

Well as a starter this is not bad at all. Give it time to get it in a stable position. Developers will understand how mobile gaming works and smartphone soc will be greater every year. So for me it's a good thing for the portable gaming concept

Since MetalFX Spatial upscaler is based on FSR 1.0's code, wouldn't it be logical to think its temporal upscaler also be based on FSR 2? Alas, why wouldn't these ports be using the Temporal upscaler to begin with?

I miss Infinity Blade so much 😢

3:59 I think this isn't the only case of this. Thats the big issue for me with stuff from the Appstore, especially games. One day you might just wake up and your 60$ purchase might simply not work anymore!

AAA games on an iDevice: Give it 4 years and after numerous IOS updates that breaks the game each time requiring the developers to patch the game it doesn't become financially viable for the developer to support the game any more and suddenly you can't play the AAA game that you "bought" for your device. I've lost count of all the games that I can no longer play. Whereas on PC you have compatibility mode and can install complementary programs and utilities (like DOSBox) to allow you to play your games for literally decades.

I believe that with love and care of optimizing these games for iOS it will succeed. I believe the next WWDC we might see Minecraft with a light form raytracing and No Mans Sky. I would actually really like to see rocket league try to come over to. No Mans Sky and Rocket League are my go to Steam Deck games.

Can we have your wallpaper showing at 6:50 ? Thanks

I remember getting GTA 3 on Android and thinking it will be years before we get GTA 4 on a phone or handheld. Now we have GTA 5 on Steam Deck running at very playable settings/fps. It's insane. The fact that my phone can run games that I played growing up like its nothing is already amazing. The fact that I can do it with more recent games now is even more insane.

Nelson, only one criticism, generally about all gaming… it’s still not as crazy as a Saturday night in the local village. Merry Christmas.

Having to carry the. Controller is the same as a handheld in size maybe not weight. Better to have a fold. Where the bottom half is a on screen controller.

I think the biggest problem with the concept of iPhone AAA gaming (iOS/iPadOS in reality) is that you are investing into a platform, not a gaming device. With Steam Deck, or any other handheld consoles, or a Mac - you just log into your existing libraries and play the games you own. With an iPhone, in addition to a full price tag for a sub-par gaming experience, you invest into a platform and get locked into it. I cant wrap my head around the fact that you'll pay 70$ for a game to never be able to play it outside of the latest A/M CPUs scope. Granted, you are probably never going to be blocked from the content you paid because you won't ever live without an iPhone at your disposal, you'll usually upgrade it and you can't live without a smartphone in a modern world.

Some of the best mobile game I played was during 2013-2015, on an iPad 2 and iPhone 3gs. Nowadays no such games bring me back that joy

Great 👍 video. I know that the A17 Pro chip supports hardware ray tracing. Does either RE Village or RE 4 supports ray tracing? 

I swear, and this is the truth, every time I finish a damn video from this channel, i feel a little smarter. I hope the audience realizes the quality of this script is not normal. The words chosen are so deliberate, so articulate yet understandable, so compact yet complete -- this is a top-tier tech article being recited through a free RU-vid video. I watch a lot of RU-vid, particularly tech channels. I have seen most or all creator videos from channels over 50k subs. On this there can be no argument. There are two, precisely two channels whose scripts are unmatched, and it is not particularly close. Number one is Snazzy Labs. Number two is (or was) Rene Ritchie. Thank you for another year of outstanding videos, Quinn. Looking forward to your continued growth in the coming year. Happy Holidays man.

What controllers are these? The ones right at the beginning?

Snazzy why dont you update your RU-vid channel cover ?

To me this is a win i always loved console games on mobile, i remember Prince of Persia WW ported by gameloft and assassin creed chronicles i was amazed back then with it, the only difference is the performance and graphics has changed, i would happily buy these games but apple need to make the iPhones run more cooler so we can have a stable frame rate, or else its just better off be on the M series iPads

I would love if GTA VI launched on the iPhone, since Rstar always launches console first, and I don’t feel like buying a the latest and greatest console just to play one game again, or waiting 2 years for a PC port. Otherwise where there’s a will, there’s a way. And there might be an early port available.

Apple needs to stop trying to act like the gaming industry is just going to bow to their demands, and actually support some damn standards! Work with valve to make a mac version of proton, start supporting vulkan, literally anything. Apple does not have the gaming market share to demand ports even with their little porting toolkit. Get the marketshare, then start making demands if you want.

First AAA game I experienced on iPhone was COD Zombies Kino Der Toten in 2012

great video.

Red magic's gaming phones seem to be better built to handle all this gaming due to its internal fan for cooling and thus it can sustain max performance for much longer.

i remember infinity Blade by square enix quite well and a few other early 2010s games Mobile gaming went down in quality and went up in mediocre mass appeasing pandering with pubg and genshin and whatever the heck else

Here at Brazil it is easier for someone to buy a ps5 than an iPhone 15 pro or pro max, taxes and prices are crazy high, and imported products are even worse because of our money value. I paid something around 7K on my 14 pro max 128Gb, the minimum salary here today is around 1.306BRL (269usd)

This makes me curious how Apple will treat gaming on the Vision Pro with even less market saturation? If a AAA game on iPhone is a hard pitch for Apple and the market hasn't shifted away from free-to-play in the last 15 years, how would gaming look like on the Vision Pro with less users? My prediction is that Vision Pro won't be any better at gaming (in terms of the market) than the Mac or iPhone and Meta will still dominate the VR/AR gaming space for a while (perhaps 2-3 years after Vision's release at best).

Apple added crossover to xcode. Its similar to valves proton, it's an abstraction layer...

The steam deck Oled is on 6nm compared to 4nm and on pretty old cpu architecture AMD’s Zen 2.

Went straight to the App Store to find bioshock and it’s of course not there :(

Well said.

Whats that game on the left side at 9:20 ?

9:20 what game is that on the right side there?

I’m genuinely surprised Skyrim isn’t on phones yet such old games like Skyrim fallout, bioshock I would say hollow knight is possible but considering its such a hard game on controller and keyboard I bet on screen it would be even worse specially in the path of pain and some bosses so maybe not hollow knight but many 2005-2013 games I bet have potential to making it to a mobile setting I suppose the developers would consider obviously have them be much cheaper like 10-15 dollars

I would definitely like to see more AAA titles on the iPhone, but the thing that I think of to compare it to isn't a PS4/5/xbox, it's the Switch. There is no way any iPhone in the last couple of years can't perform better than the Switch, and I think until Apple is ready to spend an objectively absurd amount of time/money on talent and getting someone to make their Breath of the Wild, gaming probably won't go much further on iOS.

Expected a powerful ARM SoC like the A17 Pro to blow away a low end x86 APU. The Snapdragon 8 gen 2 GPU is already on par with the A17 Pro.

I feel like capcom should of noted that the intense graphics are only for hardware in the future like the iPhone 16 17 18 so we wouldn’t all be turning it all the way up just to see how it if for the game to crash when anything intense is going on

1:24 That is actually the Apple default touch gamepad haha

The biggest problem with mobile gaming is the screen size. So… that will still be a problem for the foreseeable future. And one that the Steamdeck only remedies a bit. While I had a ton of fun on my Nintendo DS way back when, now my aging eyes can’t even locate the darn thing.

What I wonder is if next year there will be an update to the Apple TV box, with this years iPhone Pro chip (A17 Pro), and then as TVos is a fork of iOS anyway, Apple TV then becomes an alternative to Xbox/Playstation....

Waiting patiently for assassins creed. I just want to experience it on my phone for the novelty of it

There’s been sooo many AAA games on iPhone for over a decade like the GTA games, Street Fighter, etc

10:03 Amazon and Uber are literally criticized for doing the kind of shit you're advising apple to do! Get into a market, have extremely low prices, operate at a loss for years till there's no competition, and once there's no one to compete with you, set whatever price you want!

I have played re 6 and it was a good feeling in android also played some part of re 3 and re 4 and still doesnt feel so bad

Just a heads-up: Trilinear antialiasing isn’t real. Must be a mixup of TAA antialiasing and (trilinear) texture filtering. Texture filtering has no appreciable performance cost on modern systems whether set to trilinear or 16x. 👓

how much is it monthly to play games

9:25 what game is that one after alan wake 2?

I hate the mobile game industry's monetization strategies, at this point I mostly just play Duo Lingo and Cytus 2.

Whaduya mean tech demo like infinity blade‽ that was a great game, that had 2 sequels. One of the earliest games i remember playing on my iphone that felt like a full game.

6:38 not 3x at all. A17 peaks at 16 watts which is similar to the steam deck.

They’re only needs to be three settings for each Apple device. Graphics, performance, balanced.

10:42 "Genesis does what Nintendon't" Hehe, love that reference.

How hot does the phone get when playing the heavy games?

What is the game on the left at 9:20?

Xcom Enemy Unknown came out before bishock for iPhone

The Ejection of the IPhone cover sounds like clicking a pistol

So, pull an Epic Games move? Epic is still operating the game store at a loss, 5 years later. I’m not so sure Apple would be brazen enough to try this strategy.

Just preordered Death Stranding Directors Cut for iOS.

Fun Fact: you can run resident evil village just aswell on a iPhone 14 pro and even on older iPhones completely fine by side loading it

texture filter? if it is Anisotropic filtering you are talking about it has always had 0 to no impact on performance like 0.001% shadows is still by far the heaviest setting of any gam aside from antialiasing which is getting less common now upscaling with AI is a thing and also Nvidia DSR functionality.

As a Mac lifer, I wish I could properly game on it, but it’s not going to be a reality in my lifetime. I’m building a new $2K SFF gaming pc right now over the holidays to replace my $3K prebuilt that’s about 5 years old. The PC JUST runs everything from AAA to random emulators and everything in between. Sure I can play some stuff on Mac or iPhone but it’s so limited why would I bother, especially for the cost. Not too mention I can stream my PC to my phone or Mac and play my entire library from my PC. You nailed it Quinn, Apple refuses to put in the leg work, AKA lose money to build up their gaming business. For such a rich company, it would seem so easy to do this.

Infinity blade was incredible for its time

The best camera is the one that you have on you when needed. Same can be said for a console.

It’s just getting started

remember when all the iSheeps said M1 gonna destroy PC market? & i said it wont even make a dent in PC market? well same case here. AAA playable apple phones wont be able to do shit about gaming market. things only changes when android or windows does it.

Wondering if we we see re4 as a launch tittle for vision pro

Unfortunately bioshock cant be downloaded on iPhone anymore I checked

Older AAA titles that can now be played well on moble devices can either be really good for gaming or really bad for gaming

Totally agree with you. Feral ports are high quality but buying a new iphone just to run a bunch of aaa ps4 games would only work with exclusives such as marvels spiderman (believe me people would get an iphone to have that on their phones) , old ac games like ac 1,2 black flag which would run much better than mirage. Same story with ipads. Launching ported classic rts games like c&c , starcraft warcraft, dune will capture gamers.

Wish bioshock still worked