New Apple Arcade Section Warns of Titles “Leaving Soon”
19 JULY 2022 - It’s been a minute since Apple Arcade made news. That minute is up. Launched in the fall of 2019, Apple Arcade gives subscribers access to ad-free and micro-transaction-free games across a number of genres for $4.99-a-month, or as part of an Apple One subscription bundle. While the deal stays, reports from all corners say 15 of the games are about to go away.
As one piece points out, it’s not the first titles have left Apple Arcade, though it is the first time Apple’s given advanced notice. iDownloadBlog was among the sites highlighting a hard to find section of Apple Arcade labeled “Leaving Arcade Soon.” Not super hard to find, though I did have to scroll way down the page to locate it. 15 titles will be taking the long walk, though what happens next is still kind of a mystery. In its piece on the disappearing titles, Cult of Mac assumed that once you downloaded a game, the game would stay playable. But a piece from MacRumors says that site has heard otherwise. Oh, not officially. After talking to a secret someone, the site says it’s heard that “games that are removed from Apple Arcade won't be accessible under the Apple Arcade service.”
I will say, this literally makes sense if you take the name “Arcade” literally. If they took that awesome vector graphics “Star Trek” game out of your local coin-op arcade back in the day, you could no longer play it there. If you were lucky though, you could find it elsewhere, pay to play elsewhere, and play it. People didn’t pay $4.99-a-month to own “Dread Nautical.” They paid $4.99-a-month for access to “Dread Nautical,” plus however many other games Apple had in the Arcade.
It’s like when The Godfather left Netflix or when “Elizabeth R” left Netflix. Or when “Burger Time” left the West Meade Game Room.
Le sigh.
These games leaving Apple Arcade does not mean game over, man. It just means no more “free” play, which wasn’t actually free, but we’ve been over that. According to MacRumors:
Games can be re-added to the App Store on the same day that they're removed from Apple Arcade, but the games will be uploaded with a new bundle ID. That means Apple Arcade subscribers can redownload the games, but they won't have access to the same game that was available through Apple Arcade.
That site and others wonder what a title’s disappearing/reappearing nature will mean for saved progress - specifically, will in-game achievement be transferrable from the Apple Arcade version to whatever new version turns up (assuming new versions do turn up)? The answer seems to be, “we’ll find out when we do.” So far, no one seems to have said.
As for the games listed as leaving, they are:
Projection: First Light
Lifeslide
Various Daylife
EarthNight
Atone: Heart of the Elder Tree
Over the Alps
Dread Nautical
Cardpocalypse
Towaga: Among Shadows
Dead End Job
Don’t Bug Me!
Spelldrifter
Spidersaurs
Explottens
BattleSky Brigade: Harpooner
