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It looks like Big Fish’s pleasure at launching the first game subscription app for iOS has been replaced by pain and confusion, as Apple’s pulled the rug from underneath them.
Having been available on the App Store since November 18th, Big Fish’s founder was none the wiser as to why Apple had pulled a U-turn on them and ripped the app out of the App Store:
“We were notified that the app was removed. We’re trying to follow up with Apple to try to figure out what happened.”
Either Apple didn’t like the quality of Big Fish’s content or just got cheesed off that the developer was taking all the credit for a subscription game service. Perhaps Apple suddenly thought, ‘you know what, this might be a good revenue model. Let’s do it ourselves.’ Whatever happened — will we ever know? This is Apple — it looks like Big Fish’s dreams of a subscription revenue stream from iOS are at best on hold, at worst in tatters. [Bloomberg via The Verge]
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This is a shame, I’m not a fan of subscription games on mobile devices (of which there are many on android) I have to say that I intended to follow this closely to see where it led.
I hope we find out exactly why it was removed, my guess is that apple are not getting “their cut” of the subscriptions in the same way they tried to pull the stunt on Amazon’s kindle in app purchases
The subscription system is exactly the same as that employed in Newsstand, so I doubt Apple wasn’t getting a cut. Who knows. Maybe they didn’t like the icon. Could be anything like that.