Into the biggest one-day purge, Apple removed 39,000 games from its Chinese store as part of crackdown games without a government license in the country.
Conformable Reuters, the news is not a huge surprise. Apple they eliminated about 30,000 applications from the Chinese App Store in the summer, and warned that more will be removed if they weredo not receive official approval by the end of June. That deadline has been extended to 31 December. Only 74 of the first 1,500 paid games remain after yesterday’s debugging, and Aaffected games include Ubisoft The identity of Assassin’s Creed and NBA 2K20, according to resQimai search company.
Approving a game in China is a long and laborious task for many Western publishers. In essence, you need to get a Chinese ISBN number from the government“A trial that is.” almost impossible if not foreign developers team up with a Chinese publisher before launch, accordingly Engadget. Previous, Financial times reports that application developers they were allowed to sell their games in the App Store pending an official license. No more.
The most important thing here is that although games were the vast majority of purified applications, they were not no more the. In total, 46,000 applications were focused. This follows a long-standing trend of Apple leaning under pressure from the Chinese government regarding apps allowed in the App Store. Last year, Apple removed an application used by protesters in Hong Kong to pursue the police after China said Apple was a party to “illegal acts.” About the same time, also removed the Quartz news app from his store in China thanks to the publication covering the protests in Hong Kong. In 2015, Apple even he blocked it own news application from loading in China.
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Apple has always needed to step carefully when it comes to China. Not only is it second in size market, but Apple supply chain It is also very dependent on Chinese factories. (This eventually led to some delays in Apple 2020 product launches, especially iPhone 12, because of the pandemic.) The US-China trade war also led the company to consider moving anywhere from 15-30% of its production capacity outside China.
That being said, iIt’s unclear why Apple is suddenly demanding strict compliance with a Chinese licensing law that has been in place since 2016. Android app stores, such as those run by Tencent and Huawei, have historically complied with the law. Financial times suggests it may have something to do with rising tensions with the US and China, prompting the latter to increase control over Apple. Whatever the reason, does not appear to be AppleS bottom line. FT reports that Apple is likely to lose only about $ 340 million in sales, as most of the largest games are already licensed.