Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
The slogan for Apple’s freshly minted Arcade subscription service is “Play Extraordinary”, which is presumably a deliberate update of the old adverb-agnostic slogan “Think Different”. It was peculiar, then, that one of the games proudly shown off at the launch was a version of Frogger. Seriously? Guide a frog across a road, avoiding traffic, in 2019? Most potential customers won’t even remember the original.
Well, perhaps the whole thing is quite cleverly demographically targeted. Maybe Apple Arcade is aimed deliberately at ageing Gen Xers (and, at a pinch, older millennials), for whom the faint memory of Frogger recalls blurry childhood memories of lurking in videogame arcades during rain-lashed summer holidays. After all, people who are really into videogames (eg readers of this very august organ) already play the games they want on their phones and consoles, and don’t need a curated set of comforting retro and family-friendly diversions. Apple Arcade is for what we used to call the “casuals”: another way for your phone to fill in every blank moment of existential dread, or possible independent thought, until you die.
Most of the launch games are in fact rather excellent, in particular Capcom’s underwater monster-harpooner Shinsekai: Into The Depths. And Apple Arcade will, almost certainly, rapidly become the largest player in the emerging games-as-a-service subscription model, especially as it is offering a year of it for free to anyone who buys an iOS device. But therein lies the problem: it’s not the mostly conservative, PG-rated nature of the releases so far, but the business model itself, that might end up killing videogames as we know them.
Of course there were always good iOS (and Android) games available — for ages I would tell anyone who had an iPad or iPhone to buy The Room — but you had to pay for them individually, and if the last two decades have taught us anything, it’s that we shouldn’t have to pay for anything if it is on the “Internet”, broadly understood. The online monopolies, backed by their TEDtalking useful idiots in the future-of-media thought-leadership space, plus moronic managerial decisions at some newspapers and content providers, have persuaded us that we deserve all our entertainment at no cost, except for the massive personal cost of allowing surveillance of all our online habits.
But if you sign up to a subscription, it gets lost among all the other direct debits whooshing out of your bank account every month, what with Netflix and Dropbox and the rest, so it bypasses the friction of needing to purchase a single game, or TV show, or album. You just get all the entertainment you want, served up to you on a digital silver platter by experts. The attraction is obvious.
But what a subscription means is also that you never own anything, and if you let the subscription lapse then you can’t use the product ever again. This is obviously the thinking behind, for example, the general ambition to move productivity software to the service model, as Microsoft has been pushing with its depressingly named Office365. (The idea that I would have to use some portion of Office on every day of the calendar year makes me want to curl up into a ball after destroying all my computers.)
Even that isn’t the most worrying potential aspect of the new model, though. If the ambition of Apple Arcade is to become the videogame equivalent of Spotify, we ought to remember what the streaming model has done for music and musicians, and it isn’t pretty. Artists earn far less than from album or single sales, leading to muchpublicised bust-ups between Spotify and powerful musicians such as Taylor Swift, but the negative effects are much worse for midlist and emerging musicians. Cannier operators game the system by spamming the Spotify playlists with hundreds of dashed-off tracks in epic or relaxing genres, leading to a flood of bad-quality material that can earn money almost by accident.
It’s too early to say, of course, whether studios developing for Apple Arcade will face similar challenges, but the single-platform, walled-garden nature of the outlet will give pause to some who recall the bullying behaviour by the App Store, which demands its 30 per cent cut on absolutely everything. The word “Arcade” is a pleasant throwback to the 1980s, but an arcade (from the Italian for arch) was originally a covered walkway open at one or either end. For some, by contrast, Apple Arcade might offer no way out.
Apple Arcade is another way for your phone to fill in every blank moment of existential dread until you die