Apple has added an option for Apple Arcade subscribers to pay annually instead of a monthly charge of $4.99 ($59.88/year), bringing the cost of the plan down to $49.99 per year.
Malcolm Owen for AppleInsider:
As spotted by iFun, the cost difference between the monthly and annual Apple Arcade is substantial enough for many users to consider switching over, due to still being an accessible price.
MacDailyNews Take: An already great deal gets insanely great!
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Apple is really pushing hard to sell Services. Awesome.
My guess is they had to do this because people are dropping from the service like flies. It doesn’t have enough games, or offer enough value, to cost $4.99 a month and keep people. I expect a bundle that will subsidize the weaker services — News+ Arcade+ TV+, the latter being free for many.
(On that point, WTF with “For All Mankind?” Know what’s really entertaining? Watching children die. Sheesh. No thanks.)
Agreed. I didn’t see enough value there. I tried all the games that I thought might be interesting, but it wasn’t enough to keep my interest. Moved on.
The necessity for Apple Arcade has arisen because of Apple’s own failures. In failing to create a special section in the App Store for premium games, or even a separate Games Store for them, they created a rush to the bottom of either nearly free games or freemium games.
As a consequence, games developers could not be sure of a guaranteed return on their work. Whereas Infinity Blade I-II was an example of what could have been, other games producers felt unable to follow through. The requirement for all games to use the awful AppleTV controller was also unhelpful. Nintendo could potentially have been dethroned but was not.
We were therefore left with scrappy freemium games requiring ongoing purchases of gems or crystals even where users would have been content to purchase a game for a full price once and then played without top-ups.
As a consequence, Apple has now had to invent the Apple Arcade – which is a space where one can find non-freemium games for a subscription payment. I doubt that it will come close to providing games of the quality of Nintendo or the other consoles. Although an iPad is not an x-box or Playstation, it has seriously powerful chips and could have rivalled them.
Instead, through arrogance and mismanagement, real gaming is pretty much dead on Apple – like it largely died on Macs vs PCs. I doubt that we will see Apple TV or iPads rival the Nintendo Switch or other games systems.