Earlier in the day, a series of reviews on Apple Arcade were published on the web and on YouTube. Shortly after, Apple unveiled the service itself to at least one subgroup of people running iOS 13 or 13.1 beta. Arcade will not be officially launched until September 19, but it seems that Apple is using a slow deployment for some beta testers to test the service and create buzz around the launch.

The design of the Arcade tab recalls the other tabs of the App Store, although more space is reserved for highlighting individual titles. Until now, editorial content is limited. It will be interesting to see how this mix evolves as more games become available and more editorial content is created. In addition to thematic collections such as "Start Your Adventure" and "No Time to Blink", Arcade includes a section dedicated to "Newcomers", which includes index guides for three of the games and a button at the bottom of the view to access all the games. game in the service.

The Arcade activation for some users coincided with an Apple press release highlighting four smaller gaming studio games: The Enchanted World, Patterned, Overland and Card of Darkness. I have not had the opportunity to browse the entire catalog yet, but there are many great games presented at the launch that have jumped in my eyes, including:

I am looking forward to trying all this and discovering new titles.

As I said on AppStories this week, I showed cautious optimism and enthusiasm for Arcade. What I have seen of the new service in my brief period of work so far is exactly what I was hoping for. Apple seems to have found a good balance between many categories of games and with only about half of the more than 100 titles expected, it's a great start.