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Apple Arcade - the First Time User Experience perspective

How to organise 71 games

Apple Arcade - the First Time User Experience perspective

Launching a new service is always difficult.

Aside from technical considerations, the biggest obstacles is the user experience: how to onboard users and meet their expectations.

In that respect, the launch of Apple Arcade has been smoothed by the fact that it’s a subsection of the App Store.

And everyone knows how to use the App Store.

Too many games?

Issues remain, however, especially in terms of content curation.

After all, Apple has decided to have a lot of games - 71 by my count - available at launch.

That’s significantly more than the 50-odd we expected. And it creates some issues in terms of discoverability - a perennial App Store problem.

Yet considering this is a subscription service, in which players can slowly work through the available content and Apple has time to highlight different games over time, it’s certainly not a critical issue.

Nevertheless, as a First Time User Experience, diving into Apple Arcade can be a bit overwhelming.


Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.