How to Know When Apple Arcade Is Dropping Games

Photo: Pryimak Anastasiia (Shutterstock)

Apple Arcade is Apple’s solution to mobile gaming’s biggest stumbling block: Nobody wants to pay for individual games, but constant micro-transactions are equally painful. Five dollars per month for a large library of ad-free games that aren’t pay-to-win feels much more palatable. That is, until your favorite Apple Arcade games disappear from the service.

According Apple, there are over 200 games available on Apple Arcade, which offers you plenty of options for five bucks. Unfortunately, 15 of those games are now gone. The removed titles were all veterans of Apple Arcade, having appeared on the platform very early on, which implies the contracts for each have expired.

15 Games just disappeared from Apple Arcade

Here are the 15 games no longer a part of Apple Arcade:

If you try to download these games today, you won’t be able to. However, any games already downloaded to your device before they were removed will still be playable for two weeks. That means you can expect to enjoy Dead End Job, Over the Alps, and Dread Nautical until Tuesday, Aug. 16.

How to know when games are leaving Apple Arcade

If you were caught off-guard by this news, you aren’t alone. Apple did let subscribers know these 15 games were on the chopping block, but the company could have been a bit more overt about it. Rather than presenting a warning when you first open Apple Arcade or sending a notification to let you know, Apple merely decided to add a new “Leaving Arcade Soon” section to the Arcade tab in the App Store.

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That’s not necessarily a bad way to let people know about the titles leaving the service, but here’s the kicker: It’s at the bottom of the Arcade tab. In order to know when Apple Arcade is losing games (or to know that Apple Arcade losing games is a thing at all), you need to scroll to the very end of the Arcade tab on a regular basis.

There’s currently no word on what the next batch of games breaking up with Apple Arcade will be, or when it will happen. Presumably, they will be titles released close to the service’s debut, but we won’t know until we see what winds up being listed in “Leaving Apple Arcade.”

It’s a good strategy, then, to check this section when often—and if you see a title on the list that you think you’d like to play, download it immediately. You don’t need to play it right away, but once Apple removes it from Arcade, you’ll lose the ability to download it at all, and you don’t want miss out on the chance to experience it during those final, fleeting two weeks.

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