Games For The Apple TV Must Be Playable With The Remote

With the new Apple TV having been announced, one of the ways Apple has positioned the device is by showing it can be used to play games. This is thanks to the newly-designed remote control which features a touchpad, and also seems to have a Wii nunchuk-like functionality as well.

This sounds like it could be rather promising when it comes to creating games, but as it turns out it might be a little restrictive too. As discovered by one developer (via Touch Arcade), it seems that if you want to develop games for tvOS, one of the requirements is that you need to make sure that the game is playable with the remote.

According to the guidelines, “Your game must support the Apple TV remote. Your game may not require the use of a controller.” This means at the very basic level, developers will need to develop games around the use of the remote, which makes sense because Apple would want to promote the remote, but at the same time we can imagine it will be rather restricted.

What if developers wanted to create more complex games that goes beyond the remote’s functionality? Prior to this, we covered how app size limits for the Apple TV was set at 200MB, which was also a limitation in some way. Perhaps as time passes, Apple will relax their rules a bit, but for now this is what developers will have to work with.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Gadgets
Tags: Apple TV, Apps