Subscriptions have made gaming on an iPhone fun again

theverge.com:

Once upon a time, my smartphone doubled as my most-used gaming platform. It’s hard to believe now, but there was once a period when app stores felt like a new frontier, and game developers had a blast experimenting with a little touchscreen rectangle that you always had in your pocket. Then the economics changed. Games slowly got cheaper before eventually becoming free altogether. New releases had to decide between a dwindling audience for premium games or saddling their game with in-app purchases. Things became dire. But lately, I’ve been having fun with my phone again — and it’s due almost entirely to subscription services.

I came to this realization recently when I switched from Android to an iPhone and started loading my new gadget with games (that’s always the first order of business for any machine I acquire). I started out by downloading titles from the subscriptions I have — Apple Arcade and Netflix — and before I knew it, I had two dozen games in a folder, ranging from old favorites to ones I keep meaning to try. Subscriptions, even on mobile, aren’t an entirely new phenomenon. Arcade launched way back in 2019. But they’ve now matured to the point that I feel like it’s the best way to game on an iPhone.

Let’s start with Arcade, which might just be the best deal in gaming that people never seem to talk about. It launched with a huge lineup of games, things went fairly quiet for a while, and then in 2021, it got a huge boost with the introduction of classic games. There’s a good mix between the typical mobile time wasters (right now, I’m playing a lot of Grindstone, Good Sudoku, and Skate City) and bigger experiences like the old-school RPG Fantasian or Yu Suzuki’s wonderfully bizarre rail shooter Air Twister.

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