Apple announced Apple Arcade a gaming subscription service that allows users to download and play games by shelling out $4.99 a month (₹99 in India.) Apple partnered with a few gaming studios to curate around 100+ titles that would be available under this service. While availability of all these games in multiple platforms like iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV and progress sync across these devices are obvious advantages of ecosystems synergy that Apple built over these years, there are various unstated industry changing repercussions due to this move by Apple
Bye bye Pay to Win Games
While the official Genres of Games are Racing, Adventure, Puzzle, Learning, etc.. Pay to win are the category of Games that are hard to master and make you shell out money through in-app purchases to progress to next levels. App store is filled with these kind of games and users hate them. Candy crush Saga, which has about a million ratings on Appstore has the following In-App purchases
These kind of games not only are pay-baity but also act as sources of hatred for people who want to play games but don’t want to spend astronomically high amount of money for trivial things. Charm of Stripes for $39.99.. Ugh
Welcome Back Good Games
While everyone has their own discretion of good, I’d describe a game as good when it makes you work through the levels without crummy in-app purchases and are beautiful, clever and fun to play. Now that Apple mandates these Game developers to not have any in-app purchases, creative, fun games hopefully will be back!
Privacy
Conventional Games collect tons of data on game play like the levels you find difficult to cross, places within levels that engage you and other personal information. This allows them to place in-app purchases strategically to tempt users. Apple is mandating and reviewing all the Game developers not to collect any such logs. Like every Apple’s service, Privacy precedes everything.
App store, when launched in 2008 changed games forever. Here’s Apple trying to do that again!
Comments