That is not a change to the game (or their art), simply an update that keeps the game in compliance. However, that would also mean that they now have to comply with the newer privacy policies that have been put in place since their last update, and declare what data it and any 3rd party dependancies siphons from Appstore users. IMO, it's worth considering that that would be worth causing a fuss about if one did not want to expose this information.
Is the Apple app store there to provide that kind of perpetual access?
A book's perpetual existence is mostly because a physical copy exists, that's not really the same, nor is anyone assuring it still exists.
I do sympathize with the issue about requiring updates and etc, I ran into that with Google recently, but I'm not sure I buy into this idea that requiring updates shouldn't happen ever because "my game is like art and art doesn't require updates".
What do games need? A GL/vulkan context, audio system and user input. They really don't ask for much from the OS itself. It should be able to keep working because it's still doing the same thing. It wasn't broken because it had a bug, but it was broken because Apple decided to break it (and lots of other useful, feature-complete apps). Sometimes, something is just "finished". It shouldn't need "maintaining" to keep running.
All of them written by hobbyists, without support from console manufacturers, isn’t it?
Is there anything that Apple does to prevent hobbyists from writing an iOS emulator? If so, do other manufacturers do better?
Apple probably doesn't try to prevent iOS apps from being emulated but the fact that it's a fast moving target makes it much less practical.
Ideally what Stop Killing Games would like is game preservation, but at minimum we need honesty/transparency about product market places. I finally know what my minimum OS lifecycle is for my Pixel phone, and I can make a comfortable purchase decision based on that.
Even Steam isn't immune to this, it simply has an good track record relative compared to most other platforms.
Apple took a ~30% cut of the sale of the product. That should calculate into it's servicing of the product. To Ross Scott's points (and many others), if you have a perpetual service but a onetime/lifetime payment, the business model will eventually not net out.
Even if something stopped working, that doesn’t mean it can never work again.
Apple aren’t obliged to keep the platform backwards compatible as long as they let people try to run their software.
But then I searched the App Store for the game. The description still says "80% off!" from prior endless sales, the art style is pretty bad even for the 2015 copyright date, and the storyline is "I just robbed that bank" and similarly shallow storylines.
This isn't art as people would think of it, this reminds me of a run of the mill flash game from another decade.
I encourage you to review the App Store listing since that is what is being removed. The description on this free app still shows "80% off limited time sale!" on this art (which is now free, so the description makes no sense).
I think this is much ado about nothing. If you cared about the app, make it something people want. Nobody wants a game from 2015 with bad graphics and lackluster storyline.
I think you're just using an overly narrow definition of art that excludes things you don't find aesthetically pleasing. I'm assuming you also wouldn't find Rauschenberg's white paintings (https://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/art/galleries/series/...) or Picasso's various animal drawings (https://www.pablopicasso.net/images/Camel%20Pablo%20Picasso....) to be art?
Would you care to venture a definition of art?
Flash was readily available, low cost (before creative cloud), had few to no platform specific issues. Basically- the easiest possible entry for young devs and game devs.
I wasn't describing the tech stack (which was atrocious), I was describing the genre of "bad flash games"
The games developed in Flash that have lived on were better quality and had been meaningfully updated in the last decade... this app is neither high quality nor upkept.
Did you take the time to download it or look at the listing vs the article?
The article itself has a large image and no screenshots of the app. The app looks nothing like the image in the article, though.
