Overview
- On Monday, October 19, Apple ran an Indie Games Week and Oliver gave his first interview as head of App Store Worldwide to promote seven featured iPhone and iPad titles and the Store’s growing games slate.
- Oliver said the App Store has seen “incredible growth” and that more premium games are releasing on the store this year than last, a claim Apple did not quantify with player or sales data.
- He credited specific technical advances for making ports easier, naming hardware-accelerated ray tracing on the A20 Pro, the iPhone 18 Pro’s vapour chamber cooling, Game Porting Toolkit 4, Metal, MetalFX and Apple’s open-source Unity plug‑ins.
- Apple is stressing discoverability tools such as Creative Assets and editorial curation to surface indie work, and Oliver said developers will keep the choice to release games as premium downloads or place them on Apple Arcade.
- Apple declined to confirm third‑party reports about large jumps in premium sales, leaving external verification limited and raising questions about how far Apple will press its gaming push and whether big publishers will follow.