Submitted by Sammy Snyder on
Last week we looked at the gaming slump affecting the Apple App Store. It is unclear why 2019 has been devoid from good releases, but we speculated that it may have something to do with Apple's upcoming subscription service. The tech giant didn't spend much time on Apple Arcade at its Services event earlier this month, but the Finacial Times has since learned that Apple has budgeted more the $500 million for its gaming service.
The report also noted in order to receive any funding for designing an Apple Arcade title, developers will not be initially able to release their games to other platforms. Apple will have "exclusive" first rights to all games released to Apple Arcade. After a “few months” developers will then be able to release their games to Google Play, Steam and perhaps the App Store.
It makes sense that there has been a slowdown of decent premium titles being released to the App Store. Why develop a premium title on your own, if you can instead receive bigs bucks from Apple to develop it for Apple Arcade.
The gaming section of the App Store could become a graveyard of free-to-play bottom feeders depending on how Apple handles Apple Arcade titles. Pricing for the streaming service will be huge factor in addition to where premium games eventually land after their release. There aren't that many hardcore mobile gamers, as mobile gaming is still seen as a joke in many gaming communities. Apple will have to convince a lot of casual gamers to pay a monthly service fee for access to premium games, but why pay monthly if those games will eventually land on the App Store or Steam?
The App Store will also be empty of premium games until Apple Arcade titles are allowed to be released to other platforms. Perhaps Apple believes the future is in subscription-based services and plans to eventually abandoned the App Store model all together. Either way, it will be interesting to see how mobile landscape will change when Apple Arcade launches this fall.