The new year brought a ton of removals over at Apple.

Reuters reported that they have taken down no less than 39 thousand (!) games from the Chinese iOS App Store, as those were unlicensed products. This is the biggest deletion rush from them, and we can also add that they also took down tens of thousands of non-video game apps, roughly 46 thousand of them. In total, they have wiped a total of 85 thousand apps and games, which is a scary number.

Reuters cited Qimai (a research firm), claiming that out of the 1500 top paid games on the iOS App Store, only 74 (!) have remained on it after Apple did its cleaning. That means less than five per cent of the apps have stayed alive. There are a few noticeable titles that got the boot, such as Assassin’s Creed Identity: and NBA 2K20. You might be asking, why did Apple do this? The answer is simple: Apple is removing all titles that do not have a valid publishing number (or ISBN – International Standard Book Number) from China’s National Press and Publication Administration. This is the government body that handles approval for game releases.

In 2016, China passed a law that all paid games or titles with in-app purchases must be approved by this regulator. Android has been enforcing this rule since its introduction, the App Store had loopholes, allowing developers to publish games on iOS in China without having an ISBN. Apple has previously warned the developers that the licences would be mandatory, giving them a deadline of July 31 to get one, followed by removing over eight thousand games in a week in the first wave of removals. They warned them again in December with December 31 as the next deadline.

We haven’t seen such a removal wave yet.

Source: Gamesindustry