Tideward has a release date, and it is on the App Store: Thursday, February 11, 2027. The pre-order went live on August 28, and as of last week every platform version has cleared App Review: iPhone and iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Vision Pro, with the Apple Watch app riding along inside the iPhone one. Two years of building, two weeks of review, one product page.

Pre-order Tideward on the App Store

Pre-ordering costs nothing. Tideward is a free download, so the pre-order is a free reservation: on the morning of February 11 the game installs itself on every device you pre-ordered from, and nothing is charged. If you would rather play now than wait, the free TestFlight alpha stays open until launch, and the two do not conflict. Nothing stops you from doing both.

What a pre-order actually does

I had to read Apple’s documentation to answer this for myself, so here it is in one place.

  • The product page is live today at the link above, showing “Expected Feb 11, 2027.” That page is the only public, dated, machine-readable signal an unreleased Apple game can emit, which is a big part of why I wanted it up early. Steam has a “coming soon” page for every game in development; the App Store has nothing until a pre-order exists.
  • Tapping Pre-order reserves the game on your Apple Account. On release day it downloads automatically to the device you used, and to your other devices if you have automatic downloads on.
  • Because the app is free, there is no charge at any point. The full game is a single $9.99 unlock bought inside the app, whenever you decide you want it, and you cannot pre-pay it because there is nothing to pre-pay for.
  • New builds keep shipping. Apple lets a developer submit updated versions during a pre-order, and customers receive whatever version is current on release day. The build that carried the pre-order was 1.0.0; the changelog already lists 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 behind it, and that cadence continues to February.

Where it is listed

As I write this, the product page is up on the App Store in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, a set of Asia-Pacific storefronts, and Israel. The EU, EEA, and UK are not on the list yet. If your storefront shows nothing when you search, that is why, not a bug on your end; the product page is the authoritative list, and the privacy policy now describes where the App is offered rather than saying “US only,” because it is not.

What 1.0 is

If you found this page from a search and have never heard of the game, the short version: Tideward is an unhurried idle RPG, native on every Apple device, built in the RuneScape-idle lineage that Melvor Idle made famous, and priced like a premium app instead of a slot machine floor.

  • Twenty-eight trades across combat, gathering, artisan, and wayfaring groups. Every trade has its own page, with what it makes, what feeds it, and how it trains.
  • Twenty-four hours of offline progression, computed on your device. Close the app, live your life, come back to a summary of what your character did. No throttle, no ad to claim it, no premium tier that doubles it. The math is public.
  • Six Apple platforms, one purchase. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, Vision Pro, and a real fight on the Apple Watch. Your save syncs through your own iCloud; there is no account, no server of mine, and no login.
  • Fifteen languages in the box on day one, not patched in later.
  • No ads, no tracking, no third-party SDKs. The App Store’s privacy label for Tideward reads “Data Not Collected,” and the no ads, no tracking page explains why that is architecture rather than a promise.
  • Game Center, with leaderboards you can actually open, achievements, and challenges against friends, and game controllers on the phone and the television, both new since the pre-order went up.
  • Built for VoiceOver and Dynamic Type, with Reduce Motion, Increase Contrast, and Smart Invert respected. This genre is an accessibility desert and I did not want to add to it.

What it costs, in full

The download is free, and you can play a good way in before you decide anything. The full game is one $9.99 purchase, once, covering every Apple device you own, with Family Sharing on so your household is covered too. Beyond that there are a few optional cosmetics, five profile icons and one card background, each a one-time purchase that changes nothing about how the game plays. Every item and price is on the new pricing page.

The commitment behind those numbers, as it appears everywhere else on this site: Tideward is not built to keep taking your money. Every purchase is direct and one-time: you see exactly what it is, you pay once, and it is yours for good. No ads, no subscription, no loot boxes, no premium currency. Everything you bought keeps working.

What happens between now and February

Alpha builds keep going out to the Founding Testers on TestFlight, and the changelog keeps recording what changed and who reported it. The last two entries are a good picture of the pace: 1.0.1 opened the Game Center boards, added controller support, and found fifteen mid-ladder foes that were harder than anyone decided, re-deriving eleven of them; 1.0.2 rebuilt the opening walkthrough as the Keeper’s Watch, sixteen duties in four phases with a moon jelly named Bell keeping you company, because the first-open reports from the first week of September named three things: the carousel landing on the wrong rock, a Skip nobody could read, and no way back into the walkthrough once it was gone.

That is the shape of the next five months: the game is built, and it is being made better by the people playing it. If you want to be one of them, join the alpha. If you would rather wait for the finished thing, pre-order it and it will be on your devices the morning it comes out.

Where to find me

Thank you for reading this far, and for the pre-orders that are already in. It is a strange and good feeling to see a date on the calendar.

Seth, Manu Games LLC