I'm not fully sold on the practicality of cloud gaming just yet, but the idea is intriguing. You subscribe to a video game streaming service and just like other streaming platforms, you can consume content (play video games) from any supported device without needing to download the actual content, in this case, video games which can often be several GB in size and could take hours to download depending on your internet connection. In due time the teething issues may eventually be ironed out and the future of cloud gaming could be substantially brighter, but that future will not be on iPhones.

Apple confirms cloud gaming services like xCloud and Stadia violate App Store guidelinesCloud gaming and iOS are at an impasse, for now.www.theverge.com

Apple justifies this decision by claiming that the company can't review and approve the games that are available on either platform, which is something the App Store is notoriously known for. Apparently this is to "protect consumers" from apps/games of poor quality. This excuse however doesn't seem to be convincing anyone.

Many people are convinced that the only reason Apple is doing this is because A) they can't monetise these gaming platforms for their own profit, and B) Apple doesn't want competition for its own Apple Arcade game subscription service. Both claims are very plausible, and dare I say, much more likely than Apple's "can't review all the games" excuse.

Regardless, it looks like iPhone users won't be part of the larger cloud gaming revolution and will be restricted to Apple's Arcade moving forward.

I was watching a YouTube video yesterday and the guy was talking about gaming on Macs and gaming in general. Phone gaming is the fastest growing and most profitable platform by far. Several companies have made over a billion dollars in revenue on a phone game. Call of Duty phone version made more money or revenue than ALL previous versions of the game on computers. Pokémon made something like $3.7 billion from a phone version. Crazy stuff. Apple’s ARM chip allows users to play any iOS game on any other iOS platform. In other words all phone or iPad games work on the Macs or iMacs out of the box (according to developers using the new mini developers kit). Apple is also likely working on their own game controller. The new Arm chips will allow better gaming performance without the need for dedicated or separate graphics card. A couple of gaming consoles have or will soon release cpu graphics versions without cards. Gaming is in for a big upset as Apple breaks into gaming in a much bigger way. We’ll see how this affects Apple Arcade. Last year I was reading about cloud gaming and it said the technology just wasn’t ripe for wider success just yet.

Many people are convinced that the only reason Apple is doing this is because A) they can't monetise these gaming platforms for their own profit, and B) Apple doesn't want competition for its own Apple Arcade game subscription service. Both claims are very plausible, and dare I say, much more likely than Apple's "can't review all the games" excuse.

Heh...

Imagine if the outcome is to allow an Android version of iMessage into the wild as relief.

🤷‍♂️