There might have been a time when Apple did not want to let cloud gaming services like Google Stadia and Microsoft xCloud into the App Store and Microsoft had pointed out that “forcing gamers to download hundreds of individual apps to play a catalogue of cloud games would be a bad experience”. But in reality things were a little different.
According to emails unearthed by The Verge, Microsoft was willing to “play along with many of Apple’s demands and was even willing to bring AAA, Xbox-exclusive games to the iPhone.
If Microsoft brought these games to the iPhone they would have run on Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming platform (xCloud), “streaming from remote server farms filled with Xbox One and Xbox Series X processors instead of relying on the local processing power of your phone”.
That would mean iPhone users could get games like Halo Infinite from the App Store and play it like any other game instead of having to get the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription and use Microsoft’s web-based App Store workaround as one has to do now.
Microsoft’s main agenda was to bring its “Netflix-esque catalogue of xCloud games to the App Store”. Emails exchanged between Lori Wright, Microsoft Xbox’s Head of Business Development, and several members of the App Store teams show that Microsoft “did start with a wide array of concerns about stuffing an entire service worth of Xbox games into individual App Store apps as of February 2020”.
“Wright mentioned the complexity and management of creating hundreds to thousands of apps how they’d have to update every one of those apps to fix any bugs, and how all those app icons could lead to cluttered iOS homescreens, among other worries,” as per reports.
“We believe that the issues described here will create frustration and confusion for customers, resulting in a sub-par experience on Apple devices relative to the equivalent experience on all other platforms,” Wright mentioned in one of her emails.
However, by March 2020, Microsoft proposed that it could create those “hundreds or thousands of individual apps to submit to the App Store — as long as it could make those apps a bit more like shortcuts, instead of stuffing the whole cloud gaming streaming stack into each one”. Wright explained that it would be similar to how watchOS apps worked.
“If we have a single streaming tech app, it will be around 150 MB, but the other apps will only be roughly 30 MB and will not need to be updated when the streaming tech is updated. This will be a better experience for users,” Wright explained.
Reportedly this is also when Wright “pulled out” the idea of bringing exclusive AAA Xbox titles since they would need “the streaming tech package as a separate app to deliver the right experience”.
“This would be an incredibly exciting opportunity for iOS users to get access to these exclusive AAA titles in addition to the Game Pass games,” she said.
None of this worked out though. In September 2020 Microsoft rejected Apple’s new App Store guidelines and then went on to announce the web workaround version of the xCloud that launched in April this year.
Microsoft told The Verge that Apple rejected its proposals since the company insisted on “forcing each and every game to include the full streaming stack and wouldn’t agree to anything else”.
“Our proposal for bringing games through individual apps was designed to comply with App Store policies. It was denied by Apple based on our request that there be a single streaming tech app to support the individual game apps, as the initial email states. Forcing each game to include our streaming tech stack proved to be unrealistic from a support and engineering perspective and would create an incredibly negative experience for customers,” said Xbox Cloud Gaming CVP Kareem Choudhry in a statement to The Verge.
In April 2020, App Store Games Manager Mark Grimm suggested that one of the other reasons why Apple and Microsoft did not arrive at an understanding was because of money. Grimm told colleagues that Microsoft was mulling over the idea of including the streaming code in individual Xbox games on the App Store. “[Wright] was far more positive and was trying to pressure her engineering team into finding a way to put the entire streaming stack into each binary,” Grimm wrote.
Microsoft also, reportedly, did not want to put in-app purchases (IAPs) into each game. “Their proposal for IAPs is still that they process all IAPs on their existing system and settle up with us (either in real-time or monthly),” wrote Grimm, stating the opinion that “Apple should let Microsoft’s games bypass IAP”.
“They’re not trying to circumvent paying us, they’re trying to circumvent a large amount of redundant API work,” Grimm added.
Apple corroborated the money angle in this. “Unfortunately, Microsoft proposed a version of xCloud that was not compliant with our App Store Review Guidelines, specifically the requirement to use in-app purchase to unlock additional features or functionality within an app,” Apple spokesperson Adam Dema said in a statement.
Choudhry, however, denied that IAP had anything to do with the final decision between Apple and Microsoft.
“The reasons for rejection were unrelated to in-app purchase capabilities; we currently provide Xbox Cloud Gaming through a singular Xbox Game Pass app in the Google Play Store without IAP enabled, for example, and we would do the same through the App Store if allowed,” Choudhry said.
“We explored many options to bring Cloud Gaming via Xbox Game Pass to Apple devices, always in ways that led with the customer experience first, which we believed was best through a singular app. Apple’s Store policies would have forced us to launch each game as an individual app—while we never favored that approach, we explored it as a possibility in the spirit of finding any solution to bring Cloud Gaming to iOS customers,” he explained.
“However between that email in March 2020 and our statement to The Verge in September 2020, Apple rejected our proposals and we were left without the ability to release a cohesive Xbox Game Pass offering through the App Store. We shifted our engineering priorities and have now moved to a browser-based solution making Xbox Cloud Gaming available to iOS customers through web browsers, and will continue to look for viable resolutions that allow us into the App Store,” Choudhry added.
However, he confirmed that in addition to the Xbox Game Pass, the company was also open to bringing select individual games to iOS “as we do today with titles like Minecraft”.
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