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‘Apple Arcade Exclusive’ Does Not Mean What You Think

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Apple Arcade is now out in the wild, available for $5 a month, providing access to 100+ premium mobile games with no additional purchases needed, and the inability of those games to have any kind of microtransactions within them.

It’s a pretty wild experiment, given how tenuous the premium mobile market has been, but that’s…kind of why this idea was created in the first place, because it was harder for these games to break through as not-free offerings, even if they’re higher quality and less exploitative than loot box-loaded F2P offerings that dominate the iOS app store.

So far, people seem to really like the games. I’ve seen article after article from gaming sites singing the praises of one batch of titles or another, though how big the market is for Apple Arcade remains to be seen.

There is one thing about Apple Arcade that has confused some people, namely that Apple is touting all these games as “Apple Arcade exclusives.” Yet many of them are available elsewhere. What’s going on?

9to5Mac reports that the details of this are a little more complicated than “these games only exist within Apple Arcade.” In truth, the exclusivity just means two things:

1) These games cannot appear on Android, iOS’s biggest rival

2) They cannot be a part of some other subscription service, such as Xbox Game Pass or something

But that leaves a lot of grey area, meaning that these games can in fact appear on PS4, Xbox, Switch or PC. So for many of these games, you will have the ability to buy them individually on other platforms for a set dollar amount if they decide to do a cross-platform release. It’s just that the other platform cannot be Android. Almost everything else is fair game.

There is a lot of fuss lately about exclusives in games. We’ve been enduring the console wars for years now with Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo all with their rosters of exclusives. Then it was exclusive third party content for games like Sony’s Destiny deal or Microsoft’s early Call of Duty DLC. These days the hot exclusivity debate is Epic paying for exclusive access for many PC games, taking them away from Steam, with the pushback there being that the Epic Store still doesn’t have many features Steam users take for granted. Now, I’m hearing some rumblings about people upset with Apple for this Arcade exclusivity, which I guess does affect Android users, but like most of these debates, it really should not be a big deal.

I have yet to try out Apple Arcade myself yet as I have too many other games to play, but I am curious to keep an eye on it and see how it does. More later.

Follow me on TwitterFacebook and Instagram. Read my new sci-fi thriller novel Herokiller, available now in print and online. I also wrote The Earthborn Trilogy.