What a week for gaming. We got a new list of Google Stadia games, our first flurry of Gamescom 2019 announcements, and now we have some hesitant good news about the pricing plans for Apple Arcade, which is set to be a lot cheaper than you might have thought.
The Apple Arcade games subscription service is set to launch later this year (somewhere between September and November), and we got a good look at the interface and design of the platform after some leaked images from an internal preview for Apple employees.
In addition, a promotional message from inside the preview cites a $4.99 (around £4 / AU$7) per month pricing plan, which would make Apple Arcade half the price of, say, the $9.99 per month users pay for Apple News Plus or Apple Music – or the upcoming Apple TV Plus streaming service, which is expected to cost the same amount.
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Games on the cheap! Life is good!
Well, slow down. This pricing bodes well for budding gamers, though it may not yet be finalized, meaning we could see an uptick by the time it launches later this year. We still have no official word on release date or pricing, so it's best not to get too excited in advance.
However, with Apple Arcade set to launch in 150 regions worldwide, and a growing list of quality, curated games going to be on offer, any gamers on the iOS platform may have a surprisingly affordable service coming their way.
If you're big on streaming games, too, you may want to keep an eye on the Google Stadia platform – which will launch on laptops, TVs, Chromecast Ultra, and Google Pixel phones – though there's no word on it coming to iOS just yet.
- What did we think in our Google Stadia review?
