New game from Apple – but only for subscribers

Apple rarely brings out its own games. So there has been every Mac for years A chess game In addition and for billionaires and Apple investor Warren Buffett, a “Paper Boy” variant for the iPhone was published as a gift. In addition, (before) Apple finances new titles from third parties as part of its Apple Arcade game service and recently bought a small game studio. But now there is once again a “Apple original game”: Just in time for the World Emoji Day this week, the iPhone Group released its “Emoji Game”. However, the sales channel is quite special: it is only available in English -language regions (plus quebec in Canada in French) and only for a subscription fee. It is not available in the regular app store because the casual title was installed in the news app.

Games like from the newspaper

Apple News+ is Apple’s journalism offer, which bundles various magazines, newspapers and other photo and text content in a subscription. So far, however, the group has not succeeded in extending it. Instead, News+ is (still still) available only in the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Australia. In the United States, you now pay almost $ 13 for the service. “Emoji Game” also meets other mini -games that are more reminiscent of game pages from the newspaper, including Sudoku, crossword puzzles and the puzzle quartiles.

“Emoji Game” also fits in well: It is a advice game with emojis. For this purpose, words or phrases are shown with empty spaces that should be filled with the description of an emojis. Among other things, you can learn how different the meaning of emojis can be.

Prefered on the emoji holiday

Apple first showed “Emoji Game” at the WWDC 2025 developer conference in June. Actually, it was expected that it would be part of iOS 26, but the game was apparently preferred for the World Emoji Day. It remains to be seen whether it will end up in Europe at some point.

As mentioned, the minimum requirement is a news+subscription and at least iOS 18.4. The Apple news app only appears on English-language devices plus French for Canada. Users report that the title also appears under Ipados 18.4 and MacOS 15.4 or higher in the news app.