A new report from Mobilegamer.biz has bubbled to the surface containing anonymous developers telling what it’s like to work with Apple Arcade, where there are communication problems, delayed salaries and a whole lot more. According to the developers, Apple seems to have no vision for the future and doesn’t give a damn about any game studio.
“We can go weeks without hearing from Apple at all and their general response time to emails is three weeks, if they reply at all. We’re supposed to be able to ask product, technical, and commercial questions, but often half the Apple team won’t turn up, and when they do they have no idea what’s going on and can’t answer our questions, either because they don’t have any knowledge on how to answer it, or are not able to share that info for confidentiality reasons.”
Apple also doesn’t seem to care about marketing the games and even being discovered by potential players is simply impossible for some developers.
“It doesn’t matter what we put in the game, Apple won’t feature us, it’s like we don’t exist. So as a developer you think, well, they’ve given us this money for exclusivity…I don’t want to give them the money back, but I do want people to play my game. It’s like we’re invisible.”
Developers also express great frustration at not being able to release updates
“Submitting updates is so painful our developers started trying to avoid it.”
They conclude with: “It’s like an abusive relationship where the abused stays in the relationship hoping the other partner will change and become the person you know they could be.”