Image: Apple
Although the mobile gaming ecosystem is known to host live games that generate revenue more aggressively than standalone console games, there is no shortage of creators who make mobile games that do not require constant updates. Now some indie developers are discovering what can happen when you put your finished games in Apple’s app store and don’t update them for a few years: they can be removed from one of the world’s largest video game showcases.
Robert Kabwe is the developer behind Motivoto, a puzzle matching game that is free to play and does not contain microtransactions. On April 22, he received a notice from Apple stating that Motivoto will be removed from the App Store in 30 days because “it has not been updated for a significant period of time.” Kotaku asked Apple for comment, but did not receive a response until its release.
Apple’s email was about the “App Store Improvement Notice,” which suggests that the company sees this removal of games that haven’t been updated in a while as a way to improve its digital marketplace. However, Kabwe believes that the platform’s pressure to push out constant updates is an “unfair barrier for indie developers.” In a Twitter thread responding to the announcement, he said he was “trying [his] It’s best to make a living from my indie games, trying to keep up with the changes in Apple, Google, Unity, Xcode, MacOS, which are happening so fast that my head is spinning. ” He said the update requirement was “arbitrary” because Apple did not specify what type of changes it was looking for. Motivoto was last updated in March 2019.
Other developers have also been affected by the “App Store Improvement Notices”, which inform them that their games are about to be removed and they are not happy about it. Experimental game creator Emilia Laser-Walker said “games can exist as finished objects” and said her free games were “finished works of art from years ago.” Unfortunately, it seems that people who want to experience these games will now have to ask the original artist to make the equivalent of an artist who adds a drop of paint every few years to a work of art that already hangs in a gallery. But the paint is code and there is a risk that updating the game will break it so badly that it “will not work”.
Even if game developers escape the Apple ecosystem in response to these actions, Android is hardly more welcoming to creators with limited time and budget. On April 6, Google announced that the Play Store would remove apps that had not been updated within two years of the release of the latest version of Android.
Mobile devices currently account for 52% of the entire gaming market and are expected to grow even more in the future. It is really disgusting that the masters of the biggest game windows refuse to see the value of preserving games based on their artistic significance and not on the principle of endless growth.
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