The content rights are murkier for News and Music, so in the back of my head I wondered about a bundle just for Arcade and TV+. What a lot of us expected was some sort of subscription bundle - pay Apple $X per month and get Arcade, TV+, News, and maybe even Music.

(And keep in mind, too, that in some countries, Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade subscriptions cost less than $5 USD - in India they’re just $1.50 USD.) That means they’d need 100 million paying subscribers just to break even on the effort. But there are reports that Apple is already spending $6 billion annually on original content. That’s roughly $250 million in revenue per month - $3 billion per year. Let’s say Apple TV+ gets to 50 million paid subscribers. Look at it this way: Apple Music had 60 million paid subscribers as of a few months ago. Honestly, I don’t see how Apple could charge less. Maybe you don’t rent movies, but a lot of people do. As Tim Cook put it on stage, $5 per month is the cost of a single movie rental at iTunes. Well, it’s $5 per month, and I still see a lot of people complaining that it’s not even worth that without a much larger library of content.

Apple TV+Ī lot of people expected TV+ to cost $10 per month - not because they thought it looked worth $10 per month but because Apple is Apple. And: Frogger? Sayonara Wild Hearts looks very cool though - I thought that was the standout of the bunch. The Frogger demo felt like it took 10 minutes. I do question the appeal of the games Apple chose to demo on stage, though. $5 per month is all you pay, you get all the games without even a nickel’s worth of nickel-and-diming, and they’re all exclusive to Apple Arcade on mobile.

A lot of people spend a lot more than $5 per month on mobile gaming, and an important - I’ll even say essential - aspect of Apple Arcade is that none of the games include in-app purchases. $5 per month is what had been rumored, and to me feels like a fantastic deal for users, especially considering that it includes family sharing.

Brief Thoughts and Observations on Yesterday’s Apple Event, Roughly, if Not in Fact Exactly, in the Order in Which They Were Announced Wednesday, 11 September 2019 Apple Arcade

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