Image: Apple
While the mobile gaming ecosystem is known for hosting more profitable live-service games than indie console games, there’s no shortage of creators making mobile games that don’t require constant updates. Now, some indie developers are discovering what happens when you put your finished games on the Apple App Store and don’t update them for a few years: They could be pulled from one of the world’s largest video game storefronts.
Robert Kabwe is the developer behind motivation, a puzzle matching game that is free and does not contain microtransactions. On April 22, he received a notice from Apple saying motivation will be removed from the App Store within 30 days because it “has not been updated in a long time.” small house Contacted Apple for comment, but had not heard back as of press time.
Apple’s email was titled “App Store Improvement Notice,” suggesting that the company sees this culling of games that haven’t been updated in a while as a way to improve its digital marketplace. However, Kabwe sees the pressure on the platform to roll out continuous updates as an “unfair barrier to indie developers”.In a Twitter post reacting to the notification, he said he was “trying to [his] Better make a living from my indie games, trying to keep up with the changes in Apple, Google, Unity, Xcode, MacOS that are happening so fast it makes my head spin. He dismissed the update request as “arbitrary” because Apple didn’t specify what type of change it was looking for. motivation used to be Last update time March 2019.
Other developers were also hit by the “App Store Improvement Notice” informing them that their games were about to be taken down, and they weren’t happy about it. Experimental Game Creator Emilia Lazer-Walker point out “Games can exist as finished objects,” adding that her free-to-play game is “a work of art done years ago.” Unfortunately, people who want to experience these games now seem to have to ask the original artist to do the equivalent of painting a little paint every few years on the artwork that’s already hanging in the gallery.Besides paint being code, there is a risk that update the game would break it so badly that it “won’t run”.
Even as game developers flee the Apple ecosystem in response to these behaviors, Android is hardly welcoming creators with limited time and budget. On April 6, Google announced that the Play Store will remove apps that haven’t been updated for two years after the latest Android version was released.
Mobile phones currently account for 52% of the overall gaming market, and more growth is expected in the future. What’s really bad is that the overlords of the biggest gaming storefronts refuse to look at the value of saving games in terms of their artistic significance rather than the principle of infinite growth.
