by Jason Snell
Cheddar: Apple plans gaming subscription service
Apple’s push towards services gets more and more interesting. Alex Heath of Cheddar1 reports that Apple is approaching game developers about a game subscription service:
The service would function like Netflix for games, allowing users who pay a subscription fee to access a bundled list of titles. Apple began privately discussing a subscription service with game developers in the second half of 2018, said the people, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss unannounced plans.
Didn’t see this one coming, but it might be a way for Apple to steer games on its platform away from the free-to-play-but-buy-some-coins model that currently prevails. And as Federico Viticci points out, with Screen Time Apple has already built in a way to measure how much time users spend on individual apps—a system it could theoretically use to determine game developer compensation.
- “It’s a big enough market to move the needle for Apple,” analyst Gene Munster told Cheddar. Cheesy. ↩