Apple unveils Apple Arcade subscription gaming service
Apple announced a premium game subscription, Apple Arcade, for its App Store, bundling together paid iPhone and iPad games that consumers can play for a monthly fee.
Confirming rumors, the service fee will be divided among the game developers, based on how much time gamers spend playing each game.
Subscriptions are popular in games these days. Sony offers its PlayStation Plus on the PS4 for $10 a month, and Sony also offers PlayStation Now cloud gaming on the PC and PS4 for $20 a month. Microsoft has its Xbox Live Gold service for $10 a month on the Xbox One and Xbox 360, and it also offers its Xbox Game Pass on the Xbox One for $10 a month.
On the streaming front, Amazon Prime gives you access to Twitch Prime, which otherwise costs $13 a month on the PC and Mac. Utomik also offers $6 a month service for instantly accessible games. And EA is offering its EA Access service for $5 a month. EA also offers Origin Access for $5 a month.
Subscriptions are a good way to get reliable revenue at a time when free-to-play games carry so much risk. Google is likely to charge some kind of subscription fee for its Stadia cloud gaming platform, but Google has declined to comment on that so far.
“We want to make gaming even better,” said Tim Cook, Apple CEO, at the company’s press briefing today.
Ann Tai, marketing manager for the App Store, said there are 1 billion people who have downloaded games from the store. There are 300,000 games available. Besides paid and free-to-play games, ther will now be a new subscription category.
“Competing with free is hard,” Tai said.
