Apple Arcade hasn’t been an essential service for me, but a recent experience with my son has made the subscription video game service a must-have for my family. I also think my kid thinks I’m a little bit cooler now.
Apple TV, the console for non-gamers
The last time I really considered myself a gamer involved the original Sony PlayStation and Nintendo GameBoy Color. Tony Hawk: Pro Skater 1 & 2 and the early Pokémon games like Red, Blue, and Yellow kept the attention of my 7-year-old mind for hours. Twenty-three years later, I would much rather be playing guitar, riding motorcycles, or exercising in my personal time.
But when my son, who will be 4 next month, played his first video game with his cousin of the same age, I watched him discover a fun new hobby. My brother-in-law is very much an Xbox aficionado, so he already had the hardware and habit. I considered buying a console to play with my kid, but that can be a costly investment for an experiment.
That’s when I remembered the two SteelSeries Nimbus gaming controllers I bought in 2015 when the Apple TV HD first launched with an App Store. There was a racing game or two that I enjoyed trying out but not enough to make a habit of playing regularly.
Six years later, I paired the two Bluetooth controllers to the new Apple TV 4K and downloaded a handful of Arcade titles and a few non-Arcade games from the App Store. That was the start of an awesome new experience, and the Apple TV was a great solution because I already have it for the tvOS experience.
What (and how) we’re playing
My son and I bounced between games after a few minutes trying out each one until we found our favorites:
- Way of the Turtle (Arcade)
- Marble Knights (Arcade)
- PAC–MAN Party Royale (Arcade)
- Rayman Mini (Arcade)
- SpongeBob: Patty Pursuit (Arcade)
- Frogger in Toy Town (Arcade)
- Alba: A Wildlife Adventure (Arcade)
- Sonic Racing (Arcade)
Each of these games supports gaming controllers, and Marble, PAC-Man, Frogger, and Sonic offer multiplayer for playing together.
Multiplayer isn’t a big deal for us yet as long as we have two controllers. Playing games on the Apple TV that are also available on the iPad and iPhone is more important for us since the living room TV is an easier screen to share.
Both controllers can control the single-play games, so we’re truly playing together right now. This is great for his attention span and my level of involvement. I’m really invested in Way of the Turtle now that playing together has become an afternoon routine!
Happy mix of hardware, software, and services
This experience has also made me second-guess buying the standard 32GB Apple TV for the first time. It didn’t take long to run out of storage before having to offload apps, so I think an upgrade to a higher storage tier could be in our future. I would prefer to skip 64GB and go straight to 128GB, so Apple increasing the top storage is what will prompt upgrading for me.
What really made this experiment turn into an experience for us was using hardware I already had for another reason, along with a subscription service I already subscribe to for other reasons.
Arcade is priced at $4.99/month or $49.99/year for up to six users through Family Sharing. I subscribed to it for the first year to try with the family, although it wasn’t a must-have service. I pay for the Apple One Premier bundle for Apple Music, Apple TV+, and iCloud storage for the family. Including services like Arcade, News+, and Fitness+ removes the need to evaluate each service as useful enough or not.
That’s how Arcade becomes a must-have service for my family. No ads, no in-app purchases — just straightforward playback and fun.
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