As a Consumer, I'm really excited about this. I'm fed up with skinner box RNG money extraction apps, and the ability to pay once to try a catalog of games is great. I've always been hesitant to buy pricer games because I didn't know if I would like them.<p>On the other hand, iOS is probably the mobile marketplace with the highest proportion of customers willing to buy non-lootbox games. If this gains enough market share, devs will feel forced to join this program, and it's currently unclear how they will be paid out.
This move will probably obliterate game developers more than it first seems.<p>Apple Arcade <i>refused</i> to port any existing games; they only wanted brand new, exclusive content that was painstakingly developed for all their platforms. Not only is this a giant “GTFO” to developers that have stuck with their platforms for years but it practically ensures that the initial game library, no matter how big it is, will take forever to grow. Players can blow through content <i>really</i> quickly. And a “library” of X games doesn’t really count because each person will always have their favorite genres, making most games unplayable (so we are really talking about an initial library where X/30 games are actually interesting).<p>At the very least, they should have invited existing App Store games into the Arcade, provided that they met some basic requirements (no in-app purchases, etc.).<p>It is also really rich to see Apple point out questionable game behaviors on their own App Store, when Apple has complete control and could have solved the entire problem many years ago without introducing Apple Arcade at all. <i>Fix your damned App Store.</i> I hate to imagine the millions of dollars that have <i>clearly</i> been funneled to all the wrong parties, Apple included, by simply scamming people for more than a decade while legitimate developers beg for scraps.<p>Also, the existing game market will be destroyed by $4.99/month. It was already like pulling teeth to convince anyone on <i>mobile</i> to spend money but at least on the <i>Mac</i> you saw almost-traditional pricing for some games. Now, if lots of cross-platform games are available for peanuts, it will be <i>impossible</i> to charge <i>anything</i> for games, <i>even on the Mac</i>. The Mac as a gaming platform will be completely incinerated by this: if you can’t put a game in the Arcade and you can’t charge for it because Arcade is cheap, where does the game belong? On Windows and Switch, apparently.
Seems like a fair enough price. I don’t know what the deal with the developers is, but I hope it enables them to make quality games rather than the ‘free’ dopamine clickers that dominate the charts now.