Barely a week after the iOS game review site Slide to Play announced that they were shutting down, iFanzine is also calling it quits. iFanzine was one of many fabulous iOS game sites that exploded in popularity along with the growth of the iPhone and the App Store. Facing very similar problems to TouchArcade, founder and editor in chief Ruan Shiels writes in his heartfelt goodbye to the site:
This may come as a surprise, but the writing’s been on the wall for iFanzine for some time now. Over the past few years, like a number of other long-running iOS gaming sites, iFanzine fell into increasing financial difficulty due to dwindling (read: near non-existent) ad sales and external factors like Apple abruptly killing its App Store affiliate program. I tried everything I could think of to generate revenue and keep the site afloat during 2017 and 2018, but ultimately none of it was enough and here we are.
It’s pretty wild how many of us (TouchArcade included) were just holding on by a thread with the App Store affiliate program being the last remaining thing keeping them afloat. Apple killed the program back in August of last year. Previously, if you bought a game through a link on TouchArcade or any other similar site, that content creator got a few pennies on the dollar as a kickback from Apple. Not anymore.
If we didn’t have our similarly dwindling Patreon, we’d likely be in a very similar situation. It really blows my mind how there used to be such a thriving, vibrant third party editorial ecosystem surrounding iOS games which is now just … gone. This is not a good thing for a healthy market, and it’s baffling to me as to why Apple doesn’t do something to keep the people who have evangelized their platform the hardest around.
Either way, the creator of iFanzine is moving on to another project called Fierce Nice which is a gallery store specializing in limited edition, museum-quality prints and original works by Ireland’s top artists. It sucks to see things go this way, but wish Ruan all the best in his upcoming venture, which hopefully isn’t similarly squashed by a trillion dollar company on a whim. 😑
RIP iFanzine.
“it’s baffling to me as to why Apple doesn’t do something to keep the people who have evangelized their platform the hardest around”
How are you baffled? It’s how companies do business, they’ll use people until they don’t need them anymore and then abandon them. At this point the App Store is so established they’re not in any risk of losing customers because they really don’t care about these changes. Also, almost every game being released is “free” so people don’t need reviews for games to make purchase decisions, they can just play for free to see if they like it. It’s really a shame for those of us who actually buy premium games.
This is depressing news. I can't understand how an industry is making billions a year, but yet websites supporting the very same industry can't survive.
probably because passion rarely pays off, you'll need to be "biz" or "industrial" AF as pocket gamer to survive the long run. Same goes for game developers.
I am on the same boat.
Which site do you write for?
Before writing for Touch Arcade, I wrote for iFanzine for about a year. It was my first writing job and I gained a ton of experience from the opportunity the site gave me. When I finally did move on to TA, Ruan was incredibly supportive and encouraging. I was expecting this news sooner or later, but it still sucks. We lost a good one.