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If you have yet to set foot in the Apple Arcade, then perhaps it's time you did. Apple Arcade is an easy and affordable way to play popular games on your iPhone and other Apple devices. It may not be the most popular gaming subscription service, but it has reshaped mobile gaming to some extent, and it is home to a handful of excellent exclusives.
Whether you subscribe to Apple Arcade or PlayStation Plus, you can elevate your gaming experience with some of our other buying guides, from the Best Gaming Headsets to the Best Mobile Game Controllers.
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Apple Arcade offers more than 200 games for iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Mac. The library is a mixture of exclusive titles developed especially for Apple Arcade and popular games available in the regular app store and on other platforms. There are no ads or in-app purchases in Apple Arcade, and games that usually contain them are ad-free with extra content unlocked.
If you want to subscribe, you can pay $5 per month or $50 per year (£5 and £50, respectively, in the UK). You can share a subscription with up to five other family members. Each person can download, install, and play different games, just as though they had an individual membership.
It’s easy to set up a subscription on your Apple device. Here’s how:
- Open the App Store on your iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, or Mac.
- Tap or click on the Arcade tab.
- Depending on whether you have tried Apple Arcade before, you will get the option to Try It Free or Start Playing.
- Proceed, and you will be presented with payment terms and prompted to confirm.
- Weirdly, there’s no annual option when you first subscribe; it’s just $5 per month, but you can switch to the annual option by going to Settings on your iPhone or iPad, tapping your account name at the top, and choosing Subscriptions (on Apple TV it is found in User and Accounts). Select Apple Arcade and choose Apple Arcade Annual (1 Year) to switch. If you’re doing this on a Mac, you need to open the App Store app and click your account name at the bottom left, then choose Account Settings at the top, scroll down to click Manage, look for Apple Arcade listed in your Subscriptions, and click Edit.
Once you subscribe, you can pick games via the Arcade tab in the App Store app. Content is organized into categories. You will find charts listing New Games and Top Arcade Games. The latest additions here are Timeless Classics, covering things like chess and solitaire, and App Store Greats, which lists games that are available in the App Store but usually have a price tag, ads, or in-app purchases.
Apple offers anyone with an Apple device a one-month free trial of Apple Arcade. If you buy a new Apple device, you will often get a three-month free trial of Apple Arcade. It’s worth noting that if you cancel your free trial, you lose access immediately. At the end of the free trial period you will automatically be billed $5 monthly unless you cancel.
You can also get Apple Arcade as part of an Apple One subscription. It starts from $15 per month and includes Apple Music, Apple TV+, and a few other services. Apple offers a one-month free trial on Apple One, but accepting that free trial will immediately end any other free trials of any of the bundled services.
When Apple Arcade first launched, it focused on exclusive games, but Apple switched its strategy last year. You will now find several games that are also available in the App Store for a fee (including my favorite tower defense game) and some games that usually have ads or in-app purchases. The Apple Arcade version of a game always has a + added to its name. Apple adds new games frequently, but it also sometimes removes games. Here are a few of the best Apple Arcade games right now:
- Assemble With Care
- Bloons TD 6+
- Cat Quest II
- ChuChu Rocket! Universe
- Fantasian
- Goat Simulator+
- Manifold Garden
- Mini Motorways
- Neo Cab
- Oceanhorn 2
- Pilgrims
- Prune+
- Reigns+
- Samorost 3+
- Sayonara Wild Hearts
- Skate City
- Sneaky Sasquatch
- The Pathless
- What the Golf?
- Where Cards Fall
With so many game subscription services to choose from, it can be tough to work out what is worth paying for. Apple Arcade offers a selection of popular mobile games, like Google’s Play Pass, but there are also exclusives that you won’t find anywhere else. While it doesn’t have the games to compete with Microsoft and Sony’s gaming subscriptions, both of which offer the chance to play on your phone, Apple Arcade does boast several top titles.
For families in the Apple ecosystem, Apple Arcade is an easy sell. I love that it is free of ads and in-app subscriptions, and there’s enough to keep you and your kids amused for a while. I was on the verge of canceling before Apple added more depth with popular mobile games from the App Store because many of the exclusive games, although excellent, are games you play through once.
The subscription fee is easy to justify when you have a family sharing in the gaming fun. It’s not such a great deal for individuals, so you need to take a peek to see if there are enough games you want to play. You may want to dip in for a month or two to play the exclusives. You only have access to Apple Arcade titles as long as you are a subscriber, so if you focus on a couple of favorites, and they're not exclusives, it makes more sense to buy them outright.
