No. Apple claim that you can back up your iPhone to iCloud and restore it from there. If they do tell you that in fact some of the apps might disappear when you do this then it is hidden in small print somewhere. iCloud backups should work as advertised and right now they don't.
Apple cant do that becaue just having some sort of dump site (space for unmaintained ipa) will have server costs and require manpower which translate to more costs, without returns. Any good business would know to cut that off before it starts losing you money. The only reason they'd keep it would be charity, one that grows infinitely if we look at the appstore norm. So no, it wouldnt be viable to have space for people to download from. Even pirate ipa dump sites cost money.
The initial dev fee should also cover those costs. This is Apple were talking about. Not some small startup. They have more money than God. If the game didn't do well enough than that means not too many people even payed for the game, so the bandwidth should not be really high at all.
No it wont. That's the reason why some devs pull out. The app stops generating income. The initial dev fee is for a certain amount of time only. What the dev paid for the duration of their appstore listing isnt worth forever. No matter how big Apple is, we cant deny the fact that it didnt get to that status if it didnt cut away losses (no matter how small, to a point where they probably even cut them away if a product cant earn a certain quota). If a dev decided the game isnt making them money and pulls out, there's no way apple will shell out a few bucks to keep selling or maintain a file for the app. That isnt even greedy business practice. It's a successful business practice. I dont like it either, but it is what it is.
So if the dev pays $100 and the game makes $20. How much would it cost to serve a file to 20 people? Less than $1? There is not any maintenance involved having a file sit on a server. Apple owns these servers. The cost would be so insignificant. They would make much more just from consumer confidence. I will no longer pay for any any iap in a game. That's hundreds of potential dollars just from myself alone.
There is. The space it sits on can be occupied by another that pays money. in your example, the money paid by the devs for a listing is worth a certain duration of a listing. After a while the dev has the option to opt out of it if they think it wont be making them money anymore. As i mentioned in the previous post, no cost is insignificant. If a business wants to live, nothing is free. If more people did buy the "hundreds of potential dollars" just from you and those similar to you, and it was significant enough to make a profit, then it wouldnt have to make decisions of pulling out in the first place. This is somewhat a loose comparison, but it's like a book club (being the dev or publisher) renting space from the mall (apple) in order to buy/rent their products (the apps). (Yes, rent. We clicked yes on the agreement that basically says we buy license to use the apps available on the appstore, which would also loosely mean renting.) If the book club doesnt earn money through their products (selling bookmarks, coffee, book ends, and other reader paraphernalia, and the rented books/magazines), the shop would eventually close and pull out. Let's say the book shop has a "lifetime reading subscription." Im pretty sure the smart owner would let the customers sign a contract that the subscription is good as long as the book club stands. If they (the dev/publisher) did somehow close down shop, the mall (Apple) would in no way make copies of the books (apps) and display them there for the Lifetime Subscribers to make use of.
First off, stop putting people down by using "entitlement" as an insult/put down/alternative to the phrase "shame on you". And no, he does not need to "keep quiet" about this as it is not only a consumer issuse but an archival one as well. How many more copies of the first iOS game ever still exsist? How about the first 3D game? First online shooter on iOS? All these milestones are getting lost and eventually the only answer to the question "Where did gaming start on iOS? What was the first example of (genre)?" will be "I don't know" The situation may not seem like anything bad at all but do note that iOS is revoluntionary as a gaming platform and eventually these questions will be asked only to be answered by shrugs while many things of historical importance will be naught but digital dust. This is a tragedy because on iOS we can/could've so easily keep/kept track of gaming's big leap forward on mobile devices, a facet of gaming history surely to be important in the future but due to a coporate policy we won't be able to do such a thing at all. And this whole "you're not buying a game, you're buying a license" thing is utter garbage because it repersents a consumer willingness to not even stand up against any sort of coporate hoopla. No! Instead we defend these major companies as noble vanguards of the future instead of recognizing a problem that is here and now being swept over by everyone. Leasing games is eventually what it'll be called if all we get is a license to the game and the game itself. To compare, it is exactly as if you paid for a candy bar. That isn't how games should ever be treated. I can go out and buy a bunch of Warhammer models, still being able to play the blasted game years down the linewith no worry (yet) of GamesWorkshop running into my house and taking them away justifying it via the garbage argument that "you only bought a license". Now I know that I am comparing digital to physical but the point is that this shouldn't be the case at all. The whole idea of apple destroying potential history is an alarming one and even more alarming that it is so readily accepted. Yes it is their policy. It isn't good policy. We do not need to defend it. None of these companies need to defended for questionable practices. So drop the banner, and stop trying to justify harmful practices which in the end are anti-consumer.
All valid points and i agree. Unfortunately it is the utter garbage we all chose to ignore and agreed with by hitting that I Agree button.
I do agree. There's no pointing in customers have to obsess backing up every single game they've ever purchased or else the person has to live in constant fear that the game might be pulled forever anytime. I think this policy hurts apple gaming on the long run. And it will come back to bite Apple later, for sure. The blame is not to be put on the dev, but on Apple, since it is not like they lack money to keep the games up and running at least for a "reasonable" ammount of time. Especially for people that pay for large icloud storage.
I disagree. Apple should at the very least warn people that bought the game beforehand of the pull. That should be the VERY minimum of respect they owe us. And let we have some time to backup the game if we want to.
I just embrace iOS for what it is instead of lamenting what it is not. With iOS I never need to mess around with trying to download old versions of directx; everything is optimized to work perfectly on my devices, all the updates and security patches are bundled together in infrequent update packages. iOS games are really inexpensive probably averaging three of four dollars a pop. The game library is huge and new titles are being released daily. All downloads are digital managed and updated from a central place. They're a lot of advantages of this model. The downside is that developers occasionally stop supporting a particular app and it get pulled. Sometimes iOS updates breaks a small number of apps. Overall, I have a little less control over the whole process. But I'm willing to give up that control for all of the advantages. If that's not for you then I would suggest PC gaming or even android. But I think you need to look at the big picture and not just focus on a couple small negatives.
klink, I think we all love (or at least like) ios gaming. However, it doesn't mean that we can't or shouldn't complain about things we dislike. Maybe if people were more vocal about these kind of problema, Apple would do something to improve them. We can embrace the system without turning a blind eye on things that are plain wrong. Everything on life can get better, no matter what. We are talking about major problem for some people, not minor stuff. Pc gaming also have problems, so it is not a choice between one or another.
I'm always cool with being vocal on things you didn't like. It's not going to get fixed unless people say something about it. So definitely take the fight to Apple. This whole digital store thing is still relevantly new and there's still kinks to be worked out. Personally, I can kind of see Apple's point about not wanting unmaintained Apps in the App Store forever. They take up space of their servers, they'll eventually stop working with the latest versions of iOS, they might not be compatible on new iOS devices, securety vulnerablities won't be addressed. iOS is evolving over time and Apple doesn't want to have to maintain legacy support like a full fledge OS. Saying this it's just wrong to buy an App and then have it pulled a month later. That's a little different because Xbox is a pretty static platform while iOS is dynamic with new devices being released on a consistent basis.
This!! Have read your comments to the end of this thread, and I can't agree more! Doesn't make sense that it's not that way! I absolutely can't add anything 'cause you said it ALL! +1 for you, my friend, for you have your head on straight! What's wrong with some of these guys?
Nothing is wrong with anyone. Everyone knows that the current system isnt the best for consumers, and as mentioned multiple times by multiple people, some change may be needed. But that doesnt mean one person is wrong if he chooses to accept things the way they are, or another is right because he insists on having these changes enforced.
