A major deadline for the Apple App Store set by the Chinese Government’s oversight bodies has now come and gone with the new year. Games available via the Apple App Store were required to acquire an official license by the new year, a process that isn’t simple or even common when not under duress. Now firm data regarding the conclusion of this situation have been made available. As expected, Apple has followed through and removed tens of thousands of games from China’s Apple App Store.
A report issued by research firm Qimai reportedly claims that 39,000 games have been removed from the Apple App Store as part of the crackdown. This includes major game releases including titles from Ubisoft and 2K, as well as thousands of smaller games that neither have the means or the way to pursue official licenses in China. An additional non-game 7,000 apps were also removed from the service, bringing the overall total of apps removed to 46,000.
To give an idea of the audacious scope of the removal, Qimai noted that of the 1,500 top paid games on the Apple App Store only 74 survived the purge. That’s less than 5% of the most successful apps on the App Store. To say that games further down the list had a much worse chance of not being removed would be a gross understatement. The purge all but wiped out the entirety of the games section of China’s Apple App Store.
It bears repeating that it was Apple that purged the games from its own App Store, though it was only doing so due to the laws of the Chinese government. Apple had originally set the deadline for removal as mid-year 2020, but extended it to December 31 alongside a much smaller purge of around 2,000 games. The extra 6 months very likely didn’t help many game publishers or developers, as regulators approve games at an extremely slow pace.
Going forward, Apple’s Chinese storefront will only accept games that have an official license from the country’s regulatory body. Suffice to say, the throughput of new games to Chinese customers on the Apple platform will be significantly reduced. China said it was planning on a throughput of between 20-30 foreign games approved each month in 2020, but has been closer to a third of that overall.
The issue, as should be clear, is a mix of two factors. One, China’s requirements for approval are laborious and vague, making it difficult for any game developer or publisher to know if it’s worth attempting approval. Second, even should a game meet all of China’s requirements for approval, there’s still no guarantee that any single game will manage the labyrinthian process of getting evaluated at all. Even at a rate of 30 games per month, it would take over 100 years to approve the 39,000 games removed in Apple‘s recent sweep.
Source: Qimai (via Reuters)
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