Following on from my gripes about MFi controllers, I want to touch on another aspect of Apple and gaming: genres and search.

Gaming is a rare example in the App Store where Apple included genre links, enabling people to filter their browsing. But I always found the categories Apple chose a bit strange. That ‘dice’ games get their own category but platform games don’t makes me question whether this list of genres was put together by anyone who knows the first thing about gaming.

Now there are many thousands of games on the store, these categories are entirely inadequate for finding the types of games you might enjoy. Apple’s search isn’t especially helpful (type ‘platform game’ and you get a list mostly comprising not exactly great titles, and a ton of stuff is lumped in with ‘arcade’), and so Apple’s own ‘curated’ groups are probably someone’s best bet for unearthing new games within a genre — assuming Apple’s made a list and you can find it.

Ideally, Apple would rip up the genre list and start again. But perhaps there’s another way around this, giving developers some kind of tagging system based around recognised genres and sub-genres, and allowing them to select from a small range when submitting their games (each of which would have to be justified to the App Store reviewer). That way, you could feasibly with a couple of clicks or taps (or a keyword search) get an always current list of kart racers or twin-stick shooters, rather than continuing to rummage through the semi-random marketstall that is the current App Store. (And I imagine this kind of thing could work for apps, too, also plagued by very general categories.)

So my second piece of low-hanging fruit for Apple and gaming is:

2. Improve discoverability for games by creating a more robust tagging/categorisation/search system that would enable dynamic grouping of broadly similar games.