Apple was considering launching a "cloud gaming service" in parallel with Apple Arcade
In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that Apple has been considering launching some sort of "cloud gaming service" in addition to Apple Arcade, but those plans are currently inactive.
One of Gurman's readers asked him if Apple planned to create a cloud-based gaming service based on Apple Arcade, to which he replied that the company's current gaming service is "unique, relying on games that run directly on the device rather than from the cloud."
Meanwhile, remarkably, none of the cloud-based gaming services from Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, etc. have ever landed on Apple devices. This could be seen as unfair competition, but as Gurman writes, "it's not because they're competitors, but because Apple simply doesn't allow cloud-based gaming services on its devices."
Apple Arcade, though a unique gaming service in its own way, the lack of third-party "Netflix for gaming" style cloud solutions feels like an artificial limitation to average users, no matter what Gurman and Apple say. Especially in light of the fact that Netflix, a video service present on Apple platforms as apps, is gradually exploring the fertile field of cloud-based game building.
It will be interesting to see how all this relates to the rumors that Apple is planning to launch its own Nintendo Switch-style game console.