Six projects worth diving deeper into

What shipped

Apple announced the Games app at WWDC in June 2025 and shipped it on September 15, 2025, pre-installed with iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS Tahoe 26. Apple described it as a destination “designed to help players jump back into the games they love, find their next favorite, and have more fun with friends, turning even single-player games into shared experiences.”

Four tabs:

• Home — personalized recommendations, editorial features, in-game events, and whatever you were in the middle of playing.
• Arcade — Apple Arcade’s 200-plus games, given a room of their own rather than a shelf inside the App Store.
• Play Together — Game Center friends, groups, achievements and challenge invitations, in one place for the first time in years. It is called Friends now; that story is below.
• Library — every game ever downloaded from the App Store, plus Mac games.

A launch with no soft open

The app ships inside the operating system. That removes the tools most consumer launches lean on: there is no phased rollout, no opt-in beta cohort, no market-by-market ramp, no holding back a feature for a fast-follow. On September 15 it was on the home screen of every device that took the update.

Everything upstream has to absorb that. The announcement, the developer readiness and the documentation all have to be finished before the OS ships, not iterated afterward — and the first week’s reception is the reception.

The tab we renamed

Shipping is where you find out what your names actually mean to people.

“Play Together” described what the tab was for. On a tab bar, sitting next to Home, Arcade and Library, it read as an action — something you tap to start a multiplayer session — rather than as a place you go. What was actually behind it was your friends: who was playing what, whose score you had just lost to, which challenge invitation was waiting.

Players told us the name was confusing. We renamed the tab Friends soon after launch, and engagement went up.

You can watch it happen on this page. The launch renders above still read Play Together — that is what shipped in September 2025. The screenshots on the Sales project further down were taken this year, and the same tab reads Friends.

Challenges, and why they matter more than they look

Challenges were the one genuinely new player-facing mechanic: private, score-based competitions among a small group of friends, with a clock running and a rematch at the end.

The interesting part is what they’re built on. Any developer who already had a Game Center leaderboard could turn it into a challenge. No new economy, no new content pipeline, no new thing for a studio to maintain — the social layer is assembled from scores that single-player games were already recording. Apple’s launch examples were surviving waves in Thronefall and the weekly featured course in Skate City: New York.

The developer problem hiding inside a consumer launch

A destination app is only worth opening if the catalog inside it is worth browsing, and the parts that make it feel alive are the parts developers have to opt into.

Every App Store game appears in the Games app automatically — in search, in Library, in Continue Playing. But the surfaces that carry the app favor games that have done the work: Apple’s own developer guidance states that games including Game Center features and In-App Events “are prominently displayed across the Games app.” Initializing Game Center, wiring up leaderboards and achievements, configuring In-App Events in App Store Connect — that is engineering time a studio has to be persuaded to schedule.

The window between the announcement in June and the ship date in September is when a studio decides whether to do it. That was my side of the launch: strategic partner relationships, the marketing sites, recorded tutorials, case studies and technical documentation — and being the public voice for it at developer events, consumer press events and on media tours.

The strategic shift

PS4 made the console the home for player identity — profiles, friend activity, the Share button. PS5’s bet was different: turn the operating system itself into something intelligent enough to help. Not more social features, but a system that understood what you were doing and could act on it.

I ran several rounds of qualitative and quantitative research with active players, in person, to find what was actually blocking engagement.

What the research found

The numbers were stark. 98% of players get stuck at least once a year. 65% abandon a title in a given month because of an unresolved hurdle. And the workaround — searching YouTube or Google — took 5 to 15 minutes, broke immersion completely, and routinely spoiled the story on the way to the answer.

Getting players unstuck wasn’t a nice-to-have. It was the single biggest retention lever on the platform.

Deeper exploratory research told us what a solution had to look like:

• Players get stuck on specific things — logic and spatial puzzles, collectible locations, and boss fights, where the problem is a weak point or an attack timing.
• Short beats thorough. Targeted clips under a minute were strongly preferred over long walkthroughs or written guides.
• Spoilers are a dealbreaker. Players wanted progressive disclosure: a subtle text clue first, and the video solution only when they explicitly asked for it.
• They already dual-screen. Gameplay stays on the TV; the help gets read on a phone, without leaving the game.

That last finding shaped the whole product.

What we built

Three tracks, running together:

OS firmware. The system tracked active player state and, at runtime, intelligently pulled helpful footage out of the media buffer at the moment a player completed a task.

Developer tooling and APIs. An SDK that let studios define activity metadata — this is a puzzle, this is a boss — so the system knew what a player was actually attempting.

Dual-screen console and mobile UI. Progressive disclosure designed across both the console OS and the PlayStation mobile app, built around the dual-screening habit players already had rather than against it.

The flywheel

The part I’m proudest of is that Game Help feeds itself. The system detects a milestone completion and prompts the player who just succeeded to share the clip. Contributors get “helpful” ratings back, which validates the mastery and keeps them sharing. And the player who’s stuck gets guidance from a real person who actually did it — which is more trustworthy than an official walkthrough, and cheaper than producing one for every activity in every game.

A team of ten specialized creators built the fallback content system underneath, which is what kept coverage high enough for Game Help to serve 75% of platform monthly actives rather than only the titles that happened to have community clips.