Roger Fingas
The Games section of the iOS App Store has undergone a significant overhaul since mid-May, and now concentrates curated lists instead of auto-generated sections like "New" and "What's Hot," checks showed on Monday.
In their place Apple has inserted categories overseen by editorial staff, such as "Best New Games," TechCrunch observed. One holdover from the company's auto-generated content is "More Games You Might Like," which simply offers recommendations based on past downloads.
The new approach extends to gaming subgenre pages as as well, which each have banner art up top for high-profile apps, and distinct curated collections.
The changes are presumably a means of making it easier to find quality games while combating chart manipulation. In a defunct "All iPhone" section, for instance, some developers were able to get their games listed first simply by spamming the letter "A" in front of titles.
Taking a different tack, another new list type is "Pay Once & Play" — helping to avoid so-called "free-to-play" games, which often force people to make in-app purchases to advance. Parents and governments have criticized or even sued Apple for failing to close gaps in the App Store's purchase system, which have sometimes been used to dupe children into buying digital content without parental consent.
The shift to curation should also deter low-quality clone apps, since human editors can spot them and keep them out of the spotlight. Previously, an app only needed a basic amount of exposure to pick up downloads and ride algorithms into featured lists.
So far only the U.S. App Store has been affected, but Apple's new policies will likely extend to other regions over time.
AppleInsider Staff
Malcolm Owen
Oliver Haslam
Andrew O'Hara
Wesley Hilliard
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
7 Comments
Good. I'm glad to see them being more proactive. There's a lot of unoriginal garbage on the App Store, unfortunately.
Keep up the good work. We need more curation, of all kinds. More stringent requirements, set the quality bar higher.
Personally I would love for Apple to start enforcing the use of their APIs more and more. Every year, Apple develops thousands of new APIs that provide great features for users. Developers just need to integrate them. More and more, I am disappointed in the lack of attention paid to new Apple APIs.
We're almost a year to date from the first beta of iOS 8, and the Chase banking app was just updated with Touch ID login. Bank of America still doesn't have it...they were busy taking a year to roll in iPhone 6 display support.
Time for Apple to take a firm hand on lazy developers.
[quote name="pmz" url="/t/186520/app-stores-games-section-revamps-to-concentrate-on-curated-lists#post_2729566"]Keep up the good work. We need more curation, of all kinds. More stringent requirements, set the quality bar higher. Personally I would love for Apple to start enforcing the use of their APIs more and more. Every year, Apple develops thousands of new APIs that provide great features for users. Developers just need to integrate them. More and more, I am disappointed in the lack of attention paid to new Apple APIs. We're almost a year to date from the first beta of iOS 8, and the Chase banking app was just updated with Touch ID login. Bank of America still doesn't have it...they were busy taking a year to roll in iPhone 6 display support. Time for Apple to take a firm hand on lazy developers. [/quote] [quote name="TheWhiteFalcon" url="/t/186520/app-stores-games-section-revamps-to-concentrate-on-curated-lists#post_2729550"]Good. I'm glad to see them being more proactive. There's a lot of unoriginal garbage on the App Store, unfortunately.[/quote] As a developer, I agree. I do think though that you underestimate the amount of work that goes in a game, since I've never met anyone who does and isn't himself a gamedev, but curation is good. What I am afraid of, here, is more of the "rules are rules, you undeserving puny dev! / Oh, Mister Disneymarvelcocanike, how are you? Yeah, those rules, they're like, guidelines, don't over stress about it" which seems to have happened quite a lot in a few years, looking at the titles accepted and in some cases highlighted... I still am saddened by the iOS Deus Ex "game", for example, not to mention other titles...
^ Agree. The curation needs to have broad appeal across the mainstream games and the indie gems too, and be easy to access whatever kinds of games you're into. Tying it in with a better recommendation engine would be a good idea, to give the shopper better access to the curated lists that they'll be most interested in.
As a developer, I agree. I do think though that you underestimate the amount of work that goes in a game, since I've never met anyone who does and isn't himself a gamedev, but curation is good. What I am afraid of, here, is more of the "rules are rules, you undeserving puny dev! / Oh, Mister Disneymarvelcocanike, how are you? Yeah, those rules, they're like, guidelines, don't over stress about it" which seems to have happened quite a lot in a few years, looking at the titles accepted and in some cases highlighted...
I still am saddened by the iOS Deus Ex "game", for example, not to mention other titles...
Some games needed to be blocked; like the 600 Flappy Bird clones.