What’s new in Games
Dive into the latest key technologies and capabilities.
Discover Metal 4
The latest version of Metal is built to scale to the needs of modern apps. The streamlined API makes it easy for you to achieve optimal performance on Apple silicon with lower overhead command encoding and scalable resource management. Compilation is more explicit and faster than ever with all new ways to reduce run-time compilation.
Metal 4 introduces first-class support for machine learning, starting with native support for tensors in both the API and shading language. Integrate machine learning directly into your Metal app using the command line to execute large networks, or within your shaders to inline inference operations alongside the rest of your shader code.
Metal 4 also extends the MTLDevice that you already use today. You can incrementally adopt features that will help your app or game the most, in the order you need them.
Game Porting Toolkit 3
Evaluate even more games with an expanded instruction set, sparse resources, and support for MetalFX Upscaling, Denoising, and Frame Interpolation. Build and debug your game on a remote Mac from Microsoft Visual Studio. Supercharge your HLSL shaders with access to Apple GPU features such as framebuffer fetch, function constants, and intersection function buffers using Metal shader converter, and access all Metal 4 APIs from C++ using Metal-cpp.
Level up your games
Game input
Immerse players further into your games by leveraging built-in support for a wide range of popular game controllers.
- PlayStation VR2 Sense controller. Build immersive visionOS games with support for PlayStation VR2 Sense controller. Take advantage of precise input in 6 degrees of freedom and controller vibration for a whole new way to experience games on Vision Pro.
- On screen controls. Easily bring on-screen controls to your iPhone and iPad games with the touch controller API.
Cross Device game save
Effortlessly synchronize game save data across Apple devices, allowing players to pick up right where they left off, whether they’re on their iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Vision Pro.
Game Overlay
In iOS, iPadOS, or macOS, the new Game Overlay allows players to stay in the game when it matters most. Players can easily adjust settings, connect with friends, and check out the latest In-App Events and supported Game Center features, all without leaving their game.
The Apple Games app
Introducing the Games app — a new, all-in-one destination for players to get even more out of their gaming experience across Apple devices. The Games app brings players and their friends together in one convenient place where they can discover, launch, and engage with games on their iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Players can challenge one another, play together in a multiplayer match, gain achievements, and so much more. Your games will automatically appear on the Games app and you can use Game Center features and In-App Events to appear in even more places.
Game Center
New Game Center features make it even more fun for players to engage with your game and connect with friends. Use these features to appear more prominently on the new Apple Games app:
- Challenges: Turn single player activities into social experiences with friends. With challenges, players can invite their friends to compete in score-based competitions to see who can win before time runs out.
- Activities: Link players to specific destinations in your game to help them quickly take action. For example, use activities to direct people to a leaderboard, challenge, or multiplayer match.
- Multiplayer activities: Promote your game’s multiplayer experiences across the Games app, and help players seamlessly invite friends to join — even across platforms. You can configure multiplayer activities using the infrastructure provided by Game Center, or your own multiplayer system.
Managed Background Assets
Hosting your game or app assets is simpler with Managed Background Assets. Now you can automatically manage downloads, updates, streaming decompression, and more for your asset packs. This lets you easily configure how your app or game downloads your assets on people’s devices, including downloadable content (known as “DLC”). The new system-provided downloader extension is easy to drop into your app or game, and doesn’t require any custom code. Self-host your asset packs or let Apple host for you with Apple-Hosted Background Assets. Every Apple Developer Program membership includes 200GB of Apple hosting capacity for your apps and games on the App Store. Apple-Hosted Background Assets can be submitted separately from an app build.
