Apple's Arcade can succeed - if it aims at families

March 29th, 2019, 18:37 Posted By: wraggster

It's almost ten years since Apple announced the fateful decision to allow free apps on the iOS App Store to offer in-app purchases.
A decade is a pretty long time in this industry, but it feels bizarrely short when you actually look at it -- this single decision led to free-to-play becoming the dominant paradigm for mobile games and launched a market worth billions of dollars annually. It's hard to imagine mobile games any other way now, and hard to accept that there was a fork in the road just ten years ago that could have taken us in a very different direction.
Or, perhaps it couldn't. There's also a strong argument that Apple was merely bowing to inevitability when it removed the restriction that had allowed only paid-for apps to offer additional purchases. Games on the App Store were already starting to crowd around the $0.99 price point (the lowest you could price something and still offer in-app transactions afterwards), while a frustrating system of offering "Lite" games (essentially demos) that encouraged players to download the $0.99 full title (replete with IAP) had become the default.
There's a strong argument that economic reality drives up-front prices towards zero when distribution costs are effectively removed, and Apple's October 2009 decision was a necessary removal of an artificial barrier which -- though well-intentioned -- was frustrating both developers and consumers alike as they strained to find ways around it.

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