The Missing iPhone Games
The iTunes App Store became available last Thursday with the release of iTunes 7.7
When iPhone developers upload their apps to the store they choose from a range of price bands and countries in which to sell their applications. I can’t think of too many reasons why developers would want to limit their number of potential customers, but there may be some valid considerations, such as:
- Ensuring that you meet the various legal and taxation requirements in the numerous countries that you will sell to.
- Doing a ‘staged release’ by opening it up in a small market initially as a kind of test market before launching worldwide
- The availability and relevance of geographically specific data / services. Eg: there would not be much point selling to Americans an application that shows cinema times for Dublin.
- If an application has not yet been localised, it may be better to wait until that is done than to force an English version on everyone.
So it makes sense that not every app would be available in every store. For the most part however, developers can be expected to maximise their audience: there are no direct costs in making the apps available to everyone.
Why, then, are there 33-34 pages of apps (with ~21 to a page) in most of the 64 regions covered by iTunes, but only 24 pages in the stores for Brazil, China, Costa Rica, Ireland, Korea, Qatar and South Africa? The ‘Games’ section is particularly bare, with only one or two applications listed on the entire page and a barren space where Super Monkey Ball ought to be.
I emailed Pangea Software to ask why Enigmo was not available to me in the Irish store. Brian Greenstone replied promptly: “There is currently something wrong with the Ireland store because almost none of the games are showing up. You should be able to see like 150 of them, but last time I looked there were just a handful there. Apple knew about this on Thursday, so I’m not sure what’s taking them so long to fix it.” I also asked the developer of Tap Tap Revenge why its game was not available, and got another quick response, this time from Bart Decrem saying: “This is out of our control. We have requested for the app to be available in all AppStores worldwide. Sorry.”
In the case of these two games at least, it was not the developers who chose to limit the availability of their games in these countries. It’s hard to believe that it’s just a software fuck up that Apple will get around to fixing soon. It’s been like this for a few days now and countries like Brazil and China are big markets.
Why else could this be? Two possibilities come to mind, though I’m sure that there are plenty more that I haven’t thought of.
- Censorship - Perhaps these 7 countries have some requirement for all games to be rated by a government censor. This makes sense because it seems mainly to be games that are missing. The Irish censorship rules are pretty similar to the UK rules, though, so I guess it’s not a perfect explanation, but it’s possible that the process is just taking a while longer. This would mean that the games will eventually come to the store once they’ve been rated.
- Some Kind Of Fucked Up Shit with the Phone Companies - It’s possible that it is caused by the phone companies. Maybe they have some previous contracts that they can’t get easily get out of or maybe they want a cut for games downloaded over their network. This seems pretty unlikely to me - why would O2 in Ireland be so different from O2 in the UK? On the other hand though - Irish O2 doesn’t provide visual voicemail while UK O2 does, so the two countries’ O2 services are probably not tightly linked.
I doubt that this is anything but a temporary situation. The advertisements on the Irish iTunes store for Apps show the Super Monkey Ball icon and the ‘Games’ section looks pretty stupid with the blank spaces. If no games were coming Apple would surely remove that section at least. Here’s hoping that it gets sorted out soon.
(No comments but you can email me.)
Update: Games are now available. There are age ratings on them, but I’m not sure if these are the reason for the delay. Still: Yay!
