Apple held its WWDC 2024 conference today, where it dropped a heap of news around its new iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia, watchOS 11, and visionOS 2 platforms. There was some exciting news for gamers in the mix, too, including more games coming to its ecosystem and some neat new features for its devices.
Apple started by saying it’s pleased to see more developers embracing the Mac platform for games, including the likes of Larian with Baldur’s Gate 3, Capcom with the Resident Evil franchise and other titles like Death Stranding: Director’s Cut and Lies of P.
The company spoke to its “Game Porting Toolkit,” which helps developers bring their games to the Apple ecosystem across Mac, iPhone and iPad, along with introducing Game Porting Toolkit 2 which it says will allow studios to bring even more games to Mac, have improved compatibility with Windows and bring more Mac games to its mobile devices.
Games like Frostpunk 2, Resident Evil 2, Palworld and Control are launching on Mac soon, but the biggest deal was Apple bringing Ubisoft to the virtual stage to talk about Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which is set to arrive on Mac on the same day as it launches across other console and PC platforms, with support for ray-tracing, and will also be coming to iPad at an unannounced date. Ubisoft says now that its Anvil engine is fully suited to Apple’s ecosystem, it’s keen to continue bringing Anvil titles to Apple devices.
Another big bit of gaming news that Apple announced was the introduction of Game Made to iPhone within the new iOS 18, bringing the previously Mac-only feature to phones. Like on Mac, this feature minimises background activity on your phone to give full priority to your gaming performance and responsiveness, and also minimises delay when using AirPods or wireless controllers like the DualSense.
For Aussie VR fans, Apple also revealed it’s finally bringing the Apple Vision Pro to our shores next month on July 12th. Pre-orders will kick off on June 28th from the Apple web store at the below (eye-watering) prices:
You can see all of this news within the WWDC 2024 VOD below:
