Apple opened App Store Indie Games Week on October 12, 2026, spotlighting seven games making their App Store debut on iPhone and iPad. One of them, Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky, won’t arrive until October 28.
What Happened?
- Apple’s App Store is running daily features and curated collections for seven indie games throughout the week.
- No Man’s Sky from Hello Games makes its mobile debut with every major content expansion released to date.
- Sifu, the kung fu brawler, arrives with a reworked camera and custom-tuned touch controls for iPhone and iPad.
- Apple’s own captions name two companies for five of the seven games, and one each for the rest.
Carson Oliver, Apple’s head of App Store Worldwide, pitched the event as a stage for small teams in Apple’s Newsroom announcement. Oliver said:
Apple’s own copy leans on track records. It bills Sifu as critically acclaimed. It calls Vampire Crawlers a spin-off of the hit Vampire Survivors that swaps bullet dodging for tactical deck building.
Sifu is the heaviest lift of the group. Its fights throw several enemies at once, so parries, combos and improvised weapons all have to work on a touchscreen. Ports like this one feed a running debate over whether mobile gaming is becoming the new normal. Players who own a controller can skip the touch layer, since Apple lists full controller support for iPhone and iPad.
Five of the seven games list two companies
Apple’s captions name who made each game, and most name two. Sifu credits Sloclap and Kepler Interactive, while Vampire Crawlers credits poncle and Nosebleed Interactive. Only No Man’s Sky and Little Kitty, Big City carry a single name each.
Apple doesn’t say what role each company played, so the credits alone don’t show who developed or published which game. Still, the pattern sits closer to the growing-studio end of Oliver’s framing than the solo-developer end.
Apple lists four of the titles as available to download now:
- Little Kitty, Big City (Double Dagger Studio), which sends a curious cat roaming through an open-world city
- 9 Kings (Sad Socket and Playdigious), a strategy kingdom builder played with armies of cards
- Dome Keeper (Bippinbits and Raw Fury), an alien mining sim where players tunnel down and hold off attackers
- Yes, Your Grace 2: Snowfall (Brave At Night and Noodlecake Studios), a story game about hard moral calls in a collapsing empire
The lineup spans card battlers, a brawler, a cat sandbox and a space sim, covering several of the most popular gaming genres.
No Man’s Sky brings a decade of updates to phones
Apple says the space game has spent a decade evolving, and the mobile build carries all of it. That includes Cosmos, the most recent update, which lets players command their own space stations. The universe is procedurally generated and rendered entirely at runtime, Apple said, so mobile players start with ten years of additions in one download.
The App Store spotlight runs for the week, while No Man’s Sky stays on pre-order until October 28. That launch, more than the week’s daily features, will show how a long-running space game holds up on a phone. Until then, the titles already live carry the event.
