Hacker News Reader

Comment by heartbreak | Hacker News Reader

The entire Apple Arcade collection are games without invasive ads, arbitrary timers, or IAP models.

You pay the arcade subscription ($5/mo or Apple One) and the games are all free downloads.

This is very interesting and good to know. I rarely game on my phone these days, but every now and then I get that itch. I’ll check out their catalogue.

They have also been adding games that aren't exclusives to them and initially launched on the main App Store. They are all the games that have a "+" after their name. Essentially the same game will all IAP removed/made free.

I love those so much—so many great older games out there have since become unplayable because of constant intrusive ads. Like, shortly before Cut The Rope+ came out, I tried replaying the original Cut The Rope, and got an unskippable ad after every reset (or every other?). Apple Arcade gave me a way to play it again, without spending more time watching ads than actually playing.

Ads breaking old games is so frustrating. I wanted to play Risk and downloaded the official app but the ads are broken such that they never "finish" and I have to kill the app and relaunch between games to continue. I'm happy to pay for removal but I refuse to pay without being able to try the game. Same story with PvZ, they added ads everywhere and ruined the game that I paid full price for. They don't even let you remove ads or restore purchases (which feels very wrong) until you've played the first 10 levels or so. I loved PvZ so much but EA ruined it completely.

What makes me angry is when I pay to remove ads for some of these games, and then a year or two later they show me ads anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com