On the first day of July, 1571 games disappeared from the Chinese App Store

Since the beginning of July, the App Store does not accept games that have not received a local license (ISBN) for publication in China. What will happen to games that do not have permission, but which are present in the store, is still unclear. Against this background, 1571 games were “withdrawn” from the Chinese App Store only for July 1. Another 1805 projects were removed from the shelves today.

The situation, with reference to the analytical service Qimai, is reported by the Chinese business publication about GameLook games, which has previously monitored the situation. The media learned about the disappearance of the games during the preparation of the material, in which they wanted to answer two questions:

• how many games has Apple approved for the first edition?
• what happened to the games that didn’t get an ISBN, but have been on the market for a long time?

What did our colleagues find out?

First. For July 1, only 15 games were released in the Chinese App Store. For comparison, the day before — 166 games. Moreover, 14 games from this list were reviewed before July. In other words, only one game was reviewed during the day.

Games released in the Chinese App Store on July 1
Remark: this particular figure varies from source to source.

For example, in the blog of the Qimai service itself, it is mentioned that 10 iOS games were released on the first day. But the analysts’ post was also published on the same day. In other words, at the time of publication, the games could still be released.

Second. 1571 games were removed from the App Store on the first day of July. For comparison, only 276 games disappeared from the pages of the app store on June 30. It’s about more than a five-fold difference. For July 2, even more games were “withdrawn” from the store — 1805 (you can track the dynamics here).

It may seem that this is just the beginning of a campaign to reduce the library of the Chinese App Store. However, you should not rush, because there is an important nuance.

The fact is that some of the removed games had an ISBN, and, consequently, this entire array of applications was “taken off the shelf” not at all because of the lack of a license. GameLook writes about this, our source says the same:

“Some games on this day were removed by publishers themselves, some were removed due to violations of Apple’s policy, due to copyright issues, and games that had not had updates for a long time were also removed.”

The reason for the beginning of such significant “cuts” on the part of Apple could be the desire to “put the store in order before rolling out specific updates,” our interlocutor also noted.

That is, there is not a campaign to remove all games without an ISBN, but work on cleaning the app store from products that are irrelevant for iOS.

The publication on the pages of the Financial Times speaks in favor of this version. According to the publication, Apple has only frozen the possibility of updates for thousands of games. They have six months before they are removed from the App Store.

GameLook also writes that some developers are faced with the inability to update the game without providing the ISBN and related documents.

Other sources of the publication also stated that Apple requires an ISBN from them, despite the fact that there is no IAP in their applications (recall that for now only paid games and games with IAP should require a license, and games that are monetized through advertising “in theory” should not provide such data).

Another “alarm bell” is that the Chinese regulator itself reduced the number of licenses issued in June. Previously, he published a list of approved projects twice a month. Last month, only one list of 52 titles was published. By the way, in total 550 games were licensed in 2020.

Also on the topic:

• Bloomberg: Apple is going to remove thousands of iOS games from the Chinese App StoreNew details about working with the Chinese App Store after June
• More than 20 thousand iOS games can be removed from the Chinese App Store
• Is there any news?