Indie developer’s game to be taken down over weak Apple App Store policy – dev speaks out

Don’t ever let it be said that dealing with Apple is perfectly normal. With game preservation in part of the audience’s minds, as Stop Killing Games attempts to keep up some momentum and the excellent Video Game History Foundation floods its library with different magazines and materials, Apple is about to remove a game because of its odd policy.

Wheels of Aurelia is developed by Santa Ragione, a small independent studio based in Milan, Italy. It’s a visual novel that deals with some heavier themes and can be finished pretty quickly, if you’re not interested in getting all the endings.

It wasn’t the best-received title on release, but its aesthetics, music, and overall vibe are something that drove me to seek out its fifteen endings. I grabbed it off the iOS App Store because Santa Ragione has made it free due to its impending delisting.

This isn’t something of a surprise to Santa Ragione’s co-founder, Pietro Righi Riva. They were alerted on April 26 that Apple intended to remove the game due to its low downloads and lack of updates. However, Riva doesn’t see eye to eye with this policy, as the game is functional. Time, money, and effort can be put elsewhere, something that’s becoming increasingly difficult to scrape up in the industry as of late.

Wheels of Aurelia developer just doesn’t get why functional games need updates to stay on the App Store

In the initial social media post on Bluesky, Santa Ragione said:

“Despite multiple appeals and sincere efforts to seek clarification, Apple has not provided clear justification for the removal, citing only their policy to remove apps deemed ‘obsolete’ or ‘outdated’…

“We firmly believe that removing fully functional artistic works simply due to infrequent updates undermines the value and sustainability of games as cultural and artistic products…

“For smaller developers, enforced and unnecessary updates impose significant financial burdens, negatively impacting their ability to sustain existing projects and to pursue new creative endeavors.”

Santa Ragione is currently working on its next title, Horses, a creepy game that promises to blend an “eerie fusion of gameplay and live-action intermissions.” It’s set for launch this year and was announced in 2023. Pulling the tight resources of the studio to spend time updating a functional, albeit un-updated game, is clearly backwards. It’s not as if Apple is struggling for storage or bandwidth.

Improving “discoverability” shouldn’t be on the developer

However, according to Riva, the reasoning Apple gave is that this will help “improve discoverability of apps on the App Store.”

Riva reckons that having a number of older titles on the App Store “makes it harder to optimize automated curation for revenue.” He says that this sort of issue could be addressed by “shadow banning”, or removing apps that don’t meet a requirement from the curation pool. However, Riva does see that this could be seen as even more controversial.

Apple and gaming have always been weird

Apple’s relationship with game developers has always been at arm’s length, to be polite. It goes in fits and starts, pushing major AAA titles like Resident Evil and Assassin’s Creed Mirage to the most recent spate of iPhones. Of course, there was the failed Pippin, that original version of Halo, and its Apple Arcade subscription service regularly updates with some gems.

It’s estimated, based on the 70-30 split, that the recently translated gacha game, Umamusume: Pretty Derby, will have netted Apple over a million dollars from its recent Western influx of paying players.

When I asked Riva what he thought of the current state of Apple’s relationship with developers, he said that it “used to be great”:

“I think they used to be great, with a strong curation team and a focus on discovering and featuring games beyond just sales optimization.

“I believe they saw curation as a way to enhance the perceived value of their hardware and ecosystem. Nowadays, I’m not so sure.

“Their decision to only feature “family-friendly” games, both in Arcade and general featuring, doesn’t align with the kinds of titles we’ve been developing more recently.”

Cupertino responds by pointing to the policy

However, Apple sees things differently. When The Escapist got in touch with them, they referred to the policies. It mainly hinges on the lack of downloads, but also that it doesn’t follow guidelines like the lack of updates, the game simply doesn’t need.

They did point out that if the game were to ever be updated, Apple would simply restore it. Again, though, Santa Ragione just doesn’t see the need to continuously update software that’s still functional as it is.

The current limit is a lack of updates in three years, as well as meeting a threshold of downloads over 12 months. Steam, PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox have a litany of games that, under Apple’s watch, would be removed. When asked if the studio is concerned with any other platform holders removing games in the future, Riva believes it’s only a matter of time:

“Yes, I think that as older titles contribute to a perceived inflation in the cost of newer games, while also diluting player attention, platforms will begin selectively culling older titles to protect revenue.”

Other stores will probably do what Apple doesn’t want to

There are no plans at the moment for Santa Ragione to put time into reuploading the game just yet. Once the “time and resources” are available, Riva says that the studio will take advantage of the European Union’s strong-arming method of getting Apple to open up to allowing third-party stores onto iPhones. The main issue right now is that actually getting those stores onto phones is a nightmare for the everyday user.

“I think the new stores on iOS, like the Epic’s, look very promising, but we haven’t invested in porting any content yet, partly because they’re still quite difficult to install from a user experience standpoint, which limits their current potential.”

When asked what else they’d like to see from future regulations on Apple, EU, or otherwise, Riva finished the email with:

“The main point, to me, is that services operating as de facto monopolies should be subject to clear and transparent rules. They should not be allowed to rely on vague, catch-all terms and conditions as they currently do.

“This applies not just to consumers but to developers as well, who need to be able to plan their work with some assurance about whether, when, and for how long their projects will be available on the platform, and under what restrictions.”