TOCA Life World, League of Legends: Wild Rift, Fantasian… these are among the games that received the 2021 App Store Award.
The Cupertino-based company announced the 15 best apps and games that helped users tap into personal passions, discover creative outlets, connect with new people and experiences, and simply have fun.
This year's winners include developers from around the world whose apps and games were selected by Apple's global App Store editorial team for delivering exceptional quality, innovative technology, creative design, and positive cultural impact.
"This is one of our favourite times of the year when we honour our talented developer community and their incredible work making apps that entertain, inform and inspire us. In 2021, apps played a more essential role in our lives than ever before. They helped keep us moving forward in a year that continued to challenge us in so many ways, as a global community and in our own lives. Apps helped us form deeper connections with one another, express our creativity, and engage with new people, experiences and cultures," said Apple's chief executive officer, Tim Cook.
"The developers who won App Store Awards in 2021 harnessed their own drive and vision to deliver the best apps and games of the year — sparking the creativity and passion of millions of users around the world," said Cook. "From self-taught indie coders to inspiring leaders building global businesses, these standout developers innovated with Apple technology, with many helping to foster the profound sense of togetherness we needed this year."
This year's best apps and games offered extraordinary experiences across Apple devices. Ten years after its App Store debut, Toca Life World is still masterfully iterating on the art of play and self-expression for kids.
Meanwhile, the developers behind DAZN guided local sport culture into the global spotlight for everyone to enjoy, while Carrot Weather brought its best-in-class meteorological forecasts — and the witty character behind it — to users' wrists.
LumaFusion made video editing faster, less intimidating, and more portable for creators at every level, and Craft creatively enabled efficiency and artistry through a notebook with seemingly limitless capabilities. The incredible graphics and rich storylines woven into "League of Legends: Wild Rift," "Marvel Future Revolution," "Myst," "Space Marshals 3," and Apple Arcade's "Fantasian" transported players of all ages into immersive gaming experiences.
Fun and creative play
For iPhone App of the Year winner, Toca Life World, they believe in the importance and power of play.
Its director of Business Development & Partnerships, Joy Chang, said they make games for kids from their perspectives, which are fun and creative.
Currently Toca Life World has 65 million monthly active users.
"Basically the game originates from Toca Boca's first franchise Toca Life which consists of several standalone apps which encourage kids to role play and tell their own story with the tool that we provide them," said Chang.
According to her, the key to Toca Life's success is the control we give kids from their experience.
"These Toca Life apps have different themes, such as Toca Life City, Toca Life Vacation, Farms, School. They are like individual doll houses for kids to explore their story and tell their tale," she said.
"We immediately saw a very great potential to turn this role-playing experience into a self-expression experience, and that is where Toca Life World was born. So the game takes all these elements and brings them together into an ever-growing universe that has many locations and fun characters," she added.
Toca Life World really encourages kids to play, create and self express.
"There are no rules, no levels, no boundaries and no judgement, and this product is always evolving from what we learned from the kids panel that we worked with, and also from listening to our audience," said Chang.
"Since day one we have given kids full control of themselves. Our vision is to ensure that players really own their own world. We give them three creator tools - the character creator, where users can design their own character, choose their outfits, hairstyle, colours. The second top is home designer, where users are allowed to decorate their location; and the latest creator tool is character expression, which is an emoji tool box filled with different emotions for players to really express themselves," said Chang.
"We believe that this is the key part of Toca World's success where it addresses the emotional means which we think is quite important for young children," she added.
12 years of success
Meanwhile, iPhone Game of the Year - League of Legends: Wild Rift's executive producer, Michael Chow, said League of Legends is now 12 years old, and has a massive ecosystem, like the new entertainment verticals - the animated TV series Arcane, music videos with artists like Imagine Dragon.
"We also have a thriving community of incredible creators from fan art, fan fiction, animation and some of the best cosplays," he said.
Over the past 12 years, there were 600 million players in the ecosystem and nearly a third of them are active on a monthly basis.
"Not many games have this much love and engagement especially so long after they were launched. At the core of the Wild Rift's mission is just honouring that legacy. It's about honouring the players' last decade of playing the game, serving them with experience that is worthy of their next decade of investment, no matter the platform," said Chow.
Despite the success, Chow acknowledged that it was not easy getting where the company is now.
"In fact it wasn't clear for a long time that it was even possible to bring League of Legends to mobile in a way that we would be proud of," he said.
Among the challenges he and his team faced was how to realise true League gameplay on mobile, how to realise strategy gameplay on mobile, and how to do both of these two things but stay in harmony with how players use their mobile devices.
"In the West, especially for game companies like Riot, when we announce a mobile game we get a lot of hate and mistrust, and we know we really need to conquer that typical negative mobile gaming stigma with our players. These were our big challenges.
Although this may sound cliche, our success on each of these questions is really driven by dreaming big. It's a core tenet of Riot culture that we call Dare to Dream," he said
"We feel Wild Rift is better than League of Legends in almost every way. It isn't just some baby version of League of Legends, a new and improved version of League," he added.
Something new and innovative
Apple Arcade Game of the Year, Fantasian's creator and producer, Hironobu Sakaguchi, said he approached this project as his last video game initiative, and think the game his company Mistwalker developed and able to complete is worthy of that status.
"Every game that I developed, I tried to do something new and innovate in some way. For Final Fantasy 7, for example, we did the entire game using computer graphics (CG) which was a big innovation at that time, and with Fantasian, the entire environment is done using dioramas," he said.
"Although developing Fantasian with the dioramas usage was certainly challenging in some regards, it gives it a unique feel with the handcrafted creation, you can't get from any other medium," said Sakaguchi.
For him, the story of the game itself has to do with the balance or order and chaos… "and because we're using both of these analogue and digital mediums, make it really interesting."
While Sakaguchi definitely has a great vision of game making, he admits that he is not an artist (professionally).
"When I was much younger, I made a lot of Gundam model kits, but I'm definitely not a professional diorama artist," he said.
And although the dioramas look like they can be good collector's items, Sakaguchi said he haven't thought of a plan on selling them as
collectables.
"We built the dioramas mainly for photographing them and them into digital counterparts of the game, and they are actually quite fragile," he said.
Commenting on what made him decide to work with Apple Arcade, his answer was simply because of the old memory and reliving it.
"I happened to have colleagues who work at Apple and they were big Final Fantasy fans. They were, at the time, launching the Apple Arcade project and we suggested we could work together and build something for the platform, and that's how we ended up working together," he said.
"One of my first gaming experiences was on the Apple II and I remembered playing a game called Wizardry and Ultima II, and it was a culture shock to me as what they were doing with the games was just incredible. And now, as I'm nearing the end of my game development career, I think it's kind of an interesting moment that I've come to a full circle of the industry and be able to work with Apple, which is the same platform that brought me into the game universe," he concluded.
2021 App Store Award winners
Apps:
iPhone App of the Year: Toca Life World, from Toca Boca.
iPad App of the Year: LumaFusion, from LumaTouch.
Mac App of the Year: Craft, from Luki Labs Limited.
Apple TV App of the Year: DAZN, from DAZN Group.
Apple Watch App of the Year: Carrot Weather, from Grailr.
Games:
iPhone Game of the Year: "League of Legends: Wild Rift," from Riot Games.
iPad Game of the Year: "MARVEL Future Revolution," from Netmarble Corporation.
Mac Game of the Year: "Myst," from Cyan.
Apple TV Game of the Year: "Space Marshals 3," from Pixelbite.
Apple Arcade Game of the Year: "Fantasian," from Mistwalker.
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