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Apple Inc. is quietly planning a “Netflix for games” service that will allow users access to a bundle of games for a monthly subscription fee, NYC-based financial news service Cheddar reported Monday:
Apple ($AAPL) began privately discussing a subscription service with game developers in the second half of 2018, said the people, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss unannounced plans.
It’s unclear how much the subscription will cost or what kind of games Apple will offer. The service is still in the early stages of development, and Apple could ultimately decide to abandon it.
The company has also discussed partnering with developers as a publisher, according to two people familiar with the talks, which could signal Apple’s ambition to assume distribution, marketing, and other related costs for select games.
Could Make up for Slower iPhone Sales
Apple Shares tanked when CEO Tim Cook slashed revenue guidance targets in response to worse-than-expected iPhone sales. | Source: Shutterstock
For Apple Inc. stakeholders, the leaked subscription game service plans are good news as the year-over year-growth in the Palo Alto, California company’s iPhone sales “slow” from previous absolutely galactic, put-a-dent-in-the-universe magnitudes of growth to merely good and healthy levels.
In an early November 2018 interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang, EMQQ founder Kevin Carter discussed the outlook for Apple Inc., then the world’s most valuable publicly held company.
In light of the news that Apple would stop publishing unit sales numbers for iPhones, iPads, and Macs in 2019 (sending APPL shares tumbling), Carter says something very important in this interview:
I think what’s most important in a business is its revenue growth. Wherever that’s coming from.
So a saturated market for iPhones may not be good news for iPhone sales growth (which is why emerging markets are important to Apple’s future iPhone sales growth), but it’s still great news for Apple Inc. because of all the opportunities for revenue growth from all those iPhones in so many hands.
Crypto Micropayments Would be the Real Game-Changer
Would an Apple-bundled list of game titles for a subscription fee be a game changer? Maybe a profitable business plan, but nothing revolutionary. The business model has been well-demonstrated and emulated by many companies.
For iPhone users who play a lot of video games, or would if they got a bargain, this subscription service would be a great deal, but that still leaves a lot of money on the table. What about the iPhone user who doesn’t play a lot of video games on his or her phone, and wouldn’t even for a bargain price?
They might play just a little, or just a little more, but they aren’t interested in spending very much time playing, and even $0.99 premium games are more than they would pay for a game app. So for them, all Apple has is free apps with ads.
Source: Shutterstock
But what if they could make a micropayment to play? What if they only paid when they played? Say a very tiny micro-payment per second of gameplay?
1/100th cent per second of play?
You can’t charge that on a credit card, but cryptocurrencies will make this micropayment economy a vibrant growth area in the burgeoning digital economy.
Featured Image from Shutterstock
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