- Pronouns
- He/They
I’d recommend viewing the full article for further details, but my main concern is the fact Apple is endangering a solid chunk of games out of existence if they ever decided to kill it entirely.Multiple mobilegamer.biz sources have voiced their concern for Apple Arcade’s future, citing a glut of cancelled projects and ever-declining developer payouts.
One developer said there was the “the smell of death” around the service – though others suggested there are now whispers of (another) reboot for the service.
Payouts for titles on Apple Arcade have been falling for years, our sources said, and following a shift in strategy very few original games are being greenlit unless they are attached to a big family-friendly IP.
Several developers we spoke to noted that payments from Apple Arcade’s per-play ‘bonus pool’ started to decline around October 2020, and have continued to do so since. Then, as part of a reboot in spring 2021, Apple “cancelled a shitload of projects and pissed off a lot of people,” according to one source.
One studio boss told us that after months of glowing feedback on one particular game, the Arcade team suddenly withdrew its interest in the title, citing a change in strategy. When the developer asked for feedback and offered to reduce the budget and re-tool the game to better fit Apple’s needs, the Arcade team simply stopped responding to their emails.
The service is now laser-focused on family-friendly games with big IP attached, supplemented by one or two new ‘App Store Greats’ per month, which are repurposed free to play games with ads and IAPs removed.
they’ve already had a noted history of poor preservation on all of their devices (dropping 32-bit support and fully switching to ARM processors within the span of a few months, filing a C&D on a archived respiratory of old prototype iOS applications solely because they bought the company that created the testing program the apps were designed for.)
and cases of games being lost thanks to Apple losing the publishing rights have happened before over the past several months.