Talking App Store Indie Games Week with Apple - What You Need To Know! (Video)

No Man's Sky runs on an iPhone 11. That's a seven-year-old phone running a procedurally generated universe, and it's the detail I kept coming back to when I sat down with Apple's Carson Oliver, head of the global App Store, and Sebastian Kriese, head of games business development, to talk about App Store Indie Games Week.

The week spotlights seven games that are new to iPhone and iPad and available to download or preorder now: No Man's Sky, Sifu, Vampire Crawlers, Little Kitty, Big City, Dome Keeper, Nine Kings, and Yes, Your Grace 2. Sifu is a brawler where every defeat ages your character, trading health for more damage. Vampire Crawlers is a card-based spin-off of Vampire Survivors, which its solo developer built as coding practice. In Little Kitty, Big City you're a house cat trying to get home, and Sebastian says the developer studied hours of real cat videos to nail the pouncing and stretching. Dome Keeper blends resource management with tower defense and started as a weekend game-jam project. Nine Kings is a grid-based auto-battler, and Yes, Your Grace 2 is a narrative RPG about making hard calls to rebuild a kingdom.

No Man's Sky is the headliner, and it stretches what people picture when they hear "iPhone game." Sebastian says how far back to support older phones is a commercial call Apple leaves to developers. Including the iPhone 11 can mean millions more players. Apple's pitch is that its unified gaming platform lets a developer ship lower-fidelity graphics on older phones and maximum fidelity on an M-series iPad or Mac from the same foundation. Sebastian also said touch ended up helping the game, and that Hello Games is especially happy with inventory management, which he says works better on iPhone than on other platforms.

The question I cared about most was discovery. Everybody knows NBA 2K is coming every year, but a small studio can make a great game and still have nobody see it. Carson's answer is the App Store's editorial team, more than 100 people around the world who hunt through new releases for the next breakout and tell those stories through the Today tab, genre collections, and storewide moments like this one. Sebastian held up Dome Keeper, a jam project now featured in an Apple campaign. That path is real, but it runs through Apple's editors picking you.

For life after launch week, Sebastian pointed to custom product pages that let developers tailor their pitch to specific audiences, Creative Assets (launched the week before we talked) that put a game's artwork at the top of its product page, and in-game events that flag new content to lapsed players. Carson added the Games app, whose library resurfaces games you downloaded a decade ago, and Apple bringing the Sneaky Sasquatch team in-house.

If you've written off phone games as puzzle-shaped time-killers, this lineup is a decent counterargument. Sebastian's pick was Sifu, the first brawler he feels has nailed precise combat on an iPhone. Carson chose Little Kitty, Big City for its art style and cozy feel, and plans to play it with his daughter.

Looking ahead, Sebastian pointed back to the original iPhone, when Doodle Jump, Fruit Ninja, and Angry Birds came from small teams figuring out a new interface. He wants to see indies do that again with iPhone Duo, experimenting with its different screens and the ways you can hold it. The iPhone went from Fruit Ninja to running No Man's Sky on a seven-year-old model. I'm curious what indies find in a phone with more than one screen.