Apple Has Been Promising Console Gaming on iPhone for 18 Years. Is It Finally Getting It Right?

Apple has been calling the iPhone a serious gaming machine at almost every launch for the better part of two decades now. But here’s the problem, the games never quite followed. In March 2008, the iPhone SDK event showed off Sega’s Super Monkey Ball and EA’s Spore, and Apple pitched it as the move from mobile gaming to console gaming.

Then again, Apple has always seemed a little sceptical about the iPhone being perceived as a gaming phone. Legendary game developer John Carmack said it himself back in 2009: Apple’s top executives weren’t proud of the iPhone being a game machine.

This stands in almost poetic contrast to how iPhones were actually perceived back then. I remember getting an iPod Touch (the iPhone without the “phone”, but with everything else) for myself way back in 2010, to enjoy gaming and, of course, music. That iPod Touch suffered a violent death at the paws of an overly excited Golden Retriever, but I digress.

But somehow, Apple is still clinging on to its gaming identity. Its executives have probably figured out that without a gaming narrative, survival is possible, but thriving is not. And as someone who has watched this space closely, I’d say ignoring gaming would be a tragic waste of Apple’s silicon advancements, which have been every bit as spectacular as its gaming efforts have been underwhelming.

Indie Games Week

Apple kicked off Indie Games Week on 12 October 2026: seven games on iPhone and iPad, out now or on pre-order, with daily App Store features all week. But don’t let the name fool you, that’s just Apple underplaying its gaming hand, as it so often does. All seven games started life on PC or console. I’m looking at this as Apple circling back to its 18-year-old promise, so this is huge, really.

And these are not lazy, phoned-in ports either. They have been properly adapted for the iPhone and the iPad, and Apple’s choice of games feels like a genuinely well thought out, curated list. 9 Kings, for instance, sold over 250,000 copies in its first week on Steam. The gap between the PC release and the iPhone release ranges from under six months (Vampire Crawlers) to over ten years (No Man’s Sky).

Personally, I am really looking forward to playing Sifu, which gets custom touch controls, a reworked camera and full controller support on iPhone and iPad.

A barrage of delays

No Man’s Sky was promised for iPad in June 2022 and lands on 28 October 2026, about four years and four months late, picking up the iPhone along the way. At WWDC in June 2022, Apple launched Metal 3 and MetalFX, and its press release said No Man’s Sky would come to Mac and iPad later that year. The iPad part never even made it to the stage.

On 1 June 2023, the Mac version arrived, free to existing Steam owners and with cross-save. Still no iPad. Then on 12 October 2026, Apple confirmed the mobile debut on iPhone and iPad for 28 October (29 October in India, going by the App Store listing), with every major expansion up to the Cosmos update.

Is four years late still a win? Absolutely. Delays are a common occurrence in the gaming industry, and AAA titles get pushed back all the time. The upcoming GTA 6 has already been delayed twice. Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed too, and still launched in a partially broken state. The delay matters far less than the execution. So as long as these games arrive the way people have come to expect from Apple (polished, and working the way they should), I really don’t have a problem with the delays.

The AAA experiment

Apple’s 2023 push put console blockbusters on the iPhone 15 Pro at console prices, and by mid-2024 the paying buyers were estimated in the low thousands to low tens of thousands per game. Just have a look at the table below: big names, with numbers that really don’t befit a trillion-dollar behemoth.

Resident Evil Village, the RE4 remake, Death Stranding and Assassin’s Creed Mirage, all big PC and console games, were announced for the iPhone 15 Pro (a phone I once called the best gaming phone on the market) in September 2023. On iPhone, every one of them needed an A17 Pro chip or newer. Add to that, RE4 was listed at $59.99, level with PC and console. All of these games were free to download with a paid unlock, the same try-before-you-buy model No Man’s Sky uses now.

Now let’s dig a little deeper into the downloads, because a glaring pattern shows up. Going by Appfigures, RE4 was downloaded about 357,000 times, Village about 370,000 times and Mirage about 123,000 times. And the revenue? About $208,000 for RE4 and about $92,000 for Village. This data points to one outcome. Plenty of people downloaded these games and tried the free slice, and very few actually went ahead and paid for them.

Just think about it. As one AppMagic analyst pointed out, anyone who buys an iPhone 15 Pro and is ready to pay $50 for a game can easily afford a console already. So, zooming out, Apple was trying to fill a gap that needed no filling.

Why the indie route makes more sense

The indie lineup fixes the two things that sank 2023: it costs a fraction of the price and runs on far more phones. On PC, these games launched at $9.99 (Vampire Crawlers), $14.99 (9 Kings), $24.99 (Little Kitty, Big City) and $39.99 (Sifu), against $59.99 for RE4 on iPhone.

No Man’s Sky only asks for an A12 Bionic chip and iOS 26, which means anything from the iPhone 11 and the iPhone SE (2nd gen) onwards can play the game, at least on paper, unlike the previous AAA games that needed an A17 Pro.

Add to that the A20 Pro in the iPhone 18 Pro, which has a seven-core GPU, with Apple claiming up to 40% faster graphics than the A19 Pro. That is some legit gen-on-gen improvement, something Apple has been winning at lately.

There’s only one way for me to look at this. With Indie Games Week, Apple has quietly admitted that its quest for AAA gaming didn’t land. And that’s a realisation that actually helps Apple more than it hurts. As explained above, there is simply no gap Apple can fill by chasing AAA games on the iPhone. Its pivot to indie gaming just makes so much more sense.

What it costs in India

Sifu is ₹399 upfront and No Man’s Sky is free to start with a ₹1,999 unlock, as of 13 October 2026 on the Indian App Store.

The asking price for most pay-upfront indie games on the App Store sits between ₹399 and ₹499. While that isn’t an amount you dish out casually, there is still a market for it (pay-once games with no microtransactions are a model we’ve argued for before), though a lot depends on how well Apple markets them. One of the best indie games I’ve ever played, Papers, Please, is available on the App Store for ₹499, and I think that price is worth every penny to experience the sheer brilliance of this game.

Conclusion

So, is the iPhone finally the console Apple has been promising since 2008? Not quite, and honestly, I’m not sure it needs to be. What Apple seems to have finally understood (and it took a few hundred thousand free downloads and a handful of actual buyers to get there) is that most people carrying a lakh-plus iPhone can already afford a PS5 or a gaming PC if that’s what they want. What they want from their phone is something genuinely good to play on the metro, or in bed when they should really be asleep. Sifu at ₹399 fits that brief far better than RE4 at $59.99 ever did.

The timing is hard to ignore as well. John Ternus took over as Apple’s CEO on 1 September, and this is one of the first proper gaming pushes on his watch. Is that a coincidence, or the start of something more deliberate? It’s too early to say, but for an engineer who led the hardware side of the Apple Silicon transition, it would be a little odd if gaming wasn’t somewhere on his list.

As for me, I’ll be downloading No Man’s Sky the day it lands and seeing just how far an iPhone can take me across the galaxy. And if it’s the big AAA titles you’re after on your Apple devices, GeForce NOW remains the more sensible route for now, at least until Apple figures out the rest of it.