In your biggest purge in a single day, Apple removed 39,000 games from its store in China as part of a crackdown on games without government license in the country.
According Reuters, the news is not a big surprise. Apple removed about 30,000 apps of the Chinese App Store during the summer, and warned that more would be removed ifI don’t get official approval by the end of June. That period was then extended to December 31. Only 74 of the 1,500 most paid games remain after yesterday’s purgeand anmong the affected games are from Ubisoft Assassin’s Creed identity and NBA 2K20, according to research Qimai company.
Getting a game approved in China is a long and laborious task for many Western publishers. Basically, they need to get a Chinese ISBN number from the government– a process that is almost impossible unless foreign developers joined a Chinese publisher before launch, according to Engadget. Previously, the Financial Times reports that application developers were allowed to put their games on sale on the App Store pending an official license. No more.
The important thing here is that, although games were the vast majority of applications removed, they were not the only some. In total, 46,000 applications have been disabled. This follows a long-standing tendency for Apple to yield to pressure from the Chinese government regarding applications allowed on its App Store. Last year, Apple removed an app used by Hong Kong protesters track the police after China said that Apple participated in “illegal acts”. About the same time, this too removed the Quartz News app your store in China due to coverage of Hong Kong protests. In 2015, Apple even blocked your own news app loading in China.
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Apple has always had to be cautious about China. It is not only the second largest market but Apple supply chain and also heavily dependent on Chinese factories. (This one ended up leading to some delays in Apple’s 2020 product launches, most notably the iPhone 12, due to the pandemic.) The US-China trade war also prompted the company to consider moving from 15-30% of its production capacity outside China.
That said, IIt is not clear why Apple is suddenly demanding strict compliance with a Chinese licensing law that has existed since 2016. Android app stores, such as those run by Tencent and Huawei, have historically complied with the law. O Financial Times suggests that it could have something to do with increasing tensions with the US and China, prompting China to increase Apple’s scrutiny. Whatever the reason, it doesn’t seem to be Apple ‘s bottom line. FT reports that Apple is likely to lose only about $ 340 million in sales, since most of the biggest games are already licensed.