Yesterday I told you that Apple decided to offer the producer Big Fish Games the possibility to sell subscriptions for games in the App Store. The idea was simple and involved the possibility for users to buy a monthly subscription for an application and play a series of games through a Wi-Fi connection. Onlive has been doing this for some time and for them everything was successful, but for those from Big Fish Games things did not go so well because Apple decided last night to give up to the whole project.
Apple Inc. (AAPL) removed Big Fish Games Inc.'s subscription service from its App Store, reversing a move that would have given iPad users access to dozens of video games for a monthly fee.
"We were notified that the app was removed," said Paul Thelen, founder of Big Fish, a game publisher in Seattle. The app had been available since Nov. 18, he said. "We're trying to follow up with Apple to try to figure out what happened."
Thelen said he was surprised by the move because Big Fish had worked with Apple for several weeks to ensure that it met the requirements for recurring monthly charges made through the App Store, a method most commonly used by magazines and newspaper publishers.
It is interesting that although Apple initially approved the application and worked for several weeks for its launch, in the end it decided to withdraw it from the App Store without giving any explanation to the developers. No one knows the real reason why Apple threw away so much work done by developers on Saturday, but we will definitely find out more in the following days. I think that the project would have attracted quite a few users if the big game producing companies had been involved in it, but only for Big Fish Games, not too many users would have paid the monthly subscription.
I for one would have paid a monthly subscription of a few dollars to play games from the Gameloft or EA Games portfolio, but everything will probably become history now.
