According to reliable sources, Apple has canceled the development of several games planned for its Apple Arcade subscription. The firm would like to change its strategy to favor retention mechanisms.
Apple Arcade and its launch games // Source: Apple
–
To diversify its sources of revenue, Apple has relied heavily on its new services launched in 2019 like Apple TV +, for SVOD, Apple News +, for the press, or Apple Arcade for video games. Several months after the big launch, the latter seems to be experiencing some difficulties.
Journalists Jason Schreier, well known in the video game industry, and Mark Gurman, who is no longer featured for his articles on Apple, collaborated on an article published in Bloomberg and revealing a fairly significant change in internal strategy for Apple Arcade.
Foster “engagement”
Apple Arcade was born with a rather noble and welcome goal, especially for players from the PC or consoles: to offer in a subscription at low cost, quality games to download. The idea was to allow the developers of these titles to gain visibility by integrating into this subscription, and allow them to avoid having to use economic models like free to play with in-app payment that have become hegemonic on the App Store.
It is this aspect that Apple seems to partly disown from the indiscretions obtained by the two journalists. The firm would indeed have stopped the development of several games, while going in search of a new title to finance. A creative producer Apple reportedly announced the news to some affected developers in April, stating that their next games were not reaching levels ” commitments Asked. This popular term in the English-speaking world designates the capacity of a client or a player to feel involved in a game. It can be measured by the duration of the game sessions, or the frequency of connection of a player for example . A game with a high engagement rate will push players to come back regularly, sometimes with mechanics to artificially increase engagement, and to the detriment of the entertaining nature of the game.
Apple would therefore no longer place the intrinsic quality of the game as the first criterion for a title arriving in its subscription service, but rather on its ability to retain subscriptions. This criterion “d’engagementIs also the one sought by the famous gamesfree to playwhich Apple Arcade posed as an alternative.
A subscription in need of speed
According to developers interviewed, the change in strategy from Apple seems to indicate that Apple Arcade has not met with the expected success at the moment, and that the growth in the number of subscribers is not at the rendezvous. Bloomberg notes that if Apple has not released the number of subscribers to its service, the firm has extended its trial offer from 30 to 60 days, a sign that the service is struggling to attract.
This sudden change in Apple’s strategy and the end of development contracts would have caused difficulties for the game developers concerned, while the world is still going through the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. Apple would still have promised a contract renewal if the next titles from these developers matched the brand’s new criteria.
Recently, Nintendo also reportedly lowered its investments in mobile gaming in favor of the Nintendo Switch. Mobile gaming remains a very complex market today, even for a giant like Apple.
–
