Arcade not working on macOS and problems with family sharing

Ultimately, and this may not be generically helpful, but I tracked my situation down to some shared-via-iCloud disk and GameCenter issues.

I am a developer person and was using Catalina during the great "Hey my iCloud Disks are all Messed Up" thing. This made me suspicious.

I also noticed that some of the errors signing in involved my Game Center account (looking at logs while trying to run Arcade apps showed complaints from `gamed` - the daemon associated with Game Center).

I have two macOS machines that I use iCloud sharing on + a bunch of iOS devices. Arcade works on all of my iOS devices and one of the macOS devices.

I did the following -

• on the 'non working' machine I deleted my Game Center account from the Internet Accounts panel
• on the 'non working' machine I logged out entirely from iCloud - Music, Arcade, the Store, etc.
• shut it down
• on the 'working' machine I logged out of iCloud. This logged me out of Music, Arcade, the Store, etc.
• I did not delete the Game Center account there before.
• shut it down
• reboot, chicken sacrifice, ritual dance, various prayers to various deities the 'non working' machine.
• logged back into iCloud on non-working machine
• waited for everything to get re-synched, iCloud disk stuff importantly.
• rebooted for good measure, habit, superstition, etc.
• ran Arcade game I had downloaded previously. Used to go to the screen you see at the beginning-
• this time it asked me to log into Game Center instead of taking me to the Arcade Buy Page!!!
• game continued to run, things worked, ran around house in celebration
• re-logged into iCloud on 'working' machine
• everything there back to system normal

YMMV, consult your doctor to see if signing in and out of things is right for you.

I only tired this for the first time. I have a Mac mini latest model, halved 4 family members each with their own log in. I am the main account holder all others fall under my family plan. I tested on one of the other accounts and Arcade worked fine. I then went back to mine and same issue. I then signed out fully out of my icloud account, then signed back in. Then it worked. This is the first time I have had this issue and this worked. No idea why of course.....

+ 1 on this

Family Accounts Apple Arcade on Mac

Me - Admin

Child - Standard

1) Exact same problem as David

2) Temp Fix for my account:

user ~ % sudo rm "/var/db/fpsd/SC Info/SC Info.sido"

All games work.

3) Login to child's account everything works

4) Log back into my account Exact same problem as David occurs

This problem occurs for Lego Builder's Journey, and Marble it up.

This problem DOES NOT happen with Lego Brawls.

Well, I ate some lunch and sat down with the mini. I logged myself out of the App Store and tried on another account. No dice (and I wasn't surprised by that). At that point:

• I logged everyone (my wife, our two sons, and me) out of iCloud and the App Store.
• I then rebooted in Safe Mode, logged in as me, and then restarted.
• I went into recovery mode and ran First Aid on all the disks (no issues found).
• I then rebooted in Safe Mode again and uninstalled all the Apple Arcade games.
• I then restarted the mini, logged back into iCloud and the App Store on my account.
• I downloaded Fallen Knight (not previously installed on this machine) and tried to run it... and it went back to the App Store page we've all seen.

At this point, I think I've done all I can to test this here. I'm guessing it has something to do with permissions or maybe a setting file for the App Store that's corrupt, but I don't see that logging out has fixed anything (at least for our family).

I wish I could edit an easier post...

The more I think about it... /var/db/fpsd/SC Info/ is the iTunes authorization information. I get why Apple pointed msbrandao there, but I still don't think that's it, primarily because my SC Info.sido file hadn't been modified since July (when this machine came online; it was never part of the Catalina Public Beta).

Regardless, I blew it away again, and then logged into my account, my youngest son's second, and then my oldest son's. Only my oldest son's account was able to launch Sneaky Sasquatch—both my youngest's and my accounts showed the same behavior.

I fired up Sneaky Sasquatch and see this in the Console:

Dec 10 21:39:14 Mac-mini com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.rac7.SneakySasquatchMac.8324[2090]): Service exited due to SIGKILL | sent by Sasquatch[2090]

So, I fired up Oceanhorn 2 and got:

Dec 10 21:45:01 Mac-mini com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.cornfox.oceanhorn2macOS.8364[2122]): Service exited due to SIGKILL | sent by OH2[2122]

And, finally, Dear Reader:

Dec 10 21:45:42 Mac-mini com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (maccatalyst.com.localno12.losswords7.8332[2128]): Service exited due to SIGKILL | sent by Dear Reader[2128]

If I look at the Errors and Faults, I see Dear Reader generate a lot. One thing in particular that caught my eye was accountsd and the fact I get a ton of errors stating it:

"Cannot check access to a private account type: com.apple.account.AppleAccount"

In fact, I also see callservicesd show up with:

"Remote account store returned fatal error: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=4099 "The connection to service on pid 0 named com.apple.accountsd.accountmanager was invalidated." UserInfo={NSDebugDescription=The connection to service on pid 0 named com.apple.accountsd.accountmanager was invalidated.}"

Anyone familiar with how accountsd works?

I and others have noted that behavior, too. It's most certainly a security issue, but probably not the the same as one account having rights to launch an app on another account. Since the workaround for some people is tied to the the iTMS authorization, I would hazard a guess that it's because: Family User A has "purchased" the app from the App Store, Family User B goes to launch it, but the authorization doesn't have the ability to recognize the family for some reason. Thus, the app launches in the only place it's permitted to.

Curious... has anyone else seen an issue with Family Sharing and apps in Catalina? I haven't seen this with anything other than Arcade apps, personally.

I think that signing out from Apple Store will not be enough. I think I tried that already and it didn't help.

Do sign off from everything like below:

Settings->AppleID

After fiddling with a few other things, I encountered something odd.

I decided to test this Arcade issue again, so I tried to launch Dodo Peak on my youngest's account (redirected to the App Store where it shows the "Subscribed" screen, as I expected). Then I flipped back to my oldest's account (who was the one who downloaded Dodo Peak) and the game was running. I can't replicate it 100% of the time, but it does happen.

So, then, I went to my youngest's account and launched Marble It Up with no issue. I go back to my oldest's, and I can't launch Marble It Up, but I can launch Sneaky Sasquatch. In the meantime, I downloaded and installed Sayonara Wild Hearts on my account on the same machine and no one can launch that(!).

I think what we're dealing with is some sort of odd permissions issue (though the permissions are all the same on all apps in my Applications folder and I've repaired the disks and permissions via Recovery Mode to ensure everything is set correctly) that is also affecting Family Sharing (this shouldn't be a surprise for any of us with issues with the iCloud Music Library mess on Family Sharing accounts on the same Mac). I've also tried uninstalling all the Arcade apps and reinstalling them with no change in behavior.

Clearly Apple needs to do more testing with families (my 7- and 9-year-olds are NOT getting their own computers) on the same Mac. I'm happy to volunteer us, because it's pretty clear no one at Apple is using the products the way the users actually do...

I think the others are correct—it's something about Game Center, not necessarily Arcade or the App Store, and how they retrofit it to work with Arcade. I suspect there may be a machine identifier somewhere that's creating the issue you're seeing, where the first one logged in to Game Center is getting to play (effectively locking everyone else out).

Just to digress for a paragraph: If you look at the other implementations for families, you can see that some team(s) is aware as to what they're doing (sharing an iCloud storage plan or an Apple TV channel, for instance), clearly tests the corner cases, and doing it right. Others (the almost unusable user profiles in tvOS, inflexible parental restrictions in iOS/iPadOS/tvOS, wonky implementations of Screen Time across all the operating systems and none in tvOS, iCloud Music Libraries on a shared Mac, this Arcade/Game Center mess on a shared Mac, and so on) just show me (and others, I'm sure) that there is a team (or teams) who don't think about how real families use these tools and they simply aren't doing any QA to test features. I mean, my youngest looked at the "Kids" section of tvOS 13 and clearly told me he never wanted to see that again. When a 7-year-old is insulted by how you've set up a section aimed at their age range, you've done something wrong.

All that said, in the next week or so, I'm going to install Xcode on the shared Mac, fire up the Console app and see what I can find with Game Center's logs and if I can identify where it's tripping-up. I mean, I think most of us with this issue can agree that it wasn't happening, there were no changes made (that we know of) and then it started acting up, so there should be something we can point to as the culprit.

Here's the only solution, cause this problem with family sharing has existed since Apple Arcade started. CANCEL YOUR MEMBERSHIP. Stop giving apple your money for services that don't work, It's been months now, multiple post, numerous people contacting Apple support, a recent update to the Mac OS to 10.15.2 and still no fix. It's clear they have no intention of putting a lot of resources into this service.

I'm on the developer beta and even though I can download games from Apple Arcade, none of them will open on my Mac when I try to play them. And while I can still download games from the App Store's home screen, the Apple Arcade page is still showing me a "coming soon" message.

Quick note- whatever the problem is, it seems to be machine-related. On my iMac Pro @ the lab, no problem, can download and run without issue. On my MBP @ home, no dice. Both running same release of macOS. Both have roughly the same configuration.

Did an experiment and did a local keychain reset on the MBP just to see if there was some authentication cruft in there. No deal, same problem.

Unrelated/related: I'm having a similar problem with my wife's HomeKit access, where she can't seem to access the home configuration from the family, yet the rest of us can, no problem. Hers is universal, across devices, so I wondered if it might be iCloud related, which I still think might be corrupted in her universe.

Yes identical problem on a 2015 iMac. Apple Helpdesk unable to solve it. Seems to be as you say an intermittent problem and one family member might be able to access it whilst another cannot. Seems to be a problem with confirming that access is allowed. Surprised not more comment after being live for 3 weeks but I suppose most people are using Arcade on iOS devices.