Apple will now let App Store vendors use a subscription model to sell games, putting them on the same level as magazine and movie providers like the Guardian and NetFlix.
Big Fish Games, purveyor of such quality titles as Hospital Haste HD and Puppetshow: Mystery of Joyville (Full), has had its Big Fish app approved by Apple. Once downloaded, you can pay a $7-per-month subscription and enjoy any of the featured titles without further payments.
Since Apple launched in-app subscriptions and – more recently – introduced Newsstand for periodicals, iOS users have been able to pay a monthly, quarterly or yearly subscription for regular new content, whether video on demand or magazines and newspapers which automatically download overnight.
Now, with the Big Fish precedent, this same model is open to games players. It works more like the movies than the magazines, though: Games will be streamed from Big Fish's servers as you play. This means you'll need a Wi-Fi connection to play, which is bad news for one of the biggest games machines in the iOS lineup, the iPod Touch.
Still, the exact implementation of the Big Fish service isn't that important. What is important is that other publishers, perhaps with more compelling games, can now play around with the way they sell their games. Imagine a Sega or Capcom sampler app, for instance, where you pay a few bucks a month to get the first few levels of all new games. Or an app which will let you keep, say, five games on the device at one time, kind of like the NetFlix DVD model.
Even more interesting is what this means for handheld console makers like Nintendo, which is already struggling to sell expensive plastic games carts to customers now accustomed to cheap and instant downloads. Nintendo subscription channel for iPad? Yes please.
Big Fish Sells Subscriptions to Its Games on the iPad [Bloomberg]
