To be completely frank, this is a tragic situation for Chinese consumers, as well as developers all over the world.

In 2016, China passed a law that said that all games in the country - console, mobile, arcade, etc - needed to get a game license from the government. In reality, so far they've only been concerned with paid games and games that offered in-app purchases. Free games and ad-supported games...well, they've basically been looking the other way.

Immediately, the 100+ Android app stores (remember, Google Play is banned in China) took action and required this of all of their submissions. Apple, desperate to maintain market share and relevance in China (where it has steadily been losing out to Huawei and Android in general, but still gets a whopping 18% of its revenue due to the sheer size of the market), somehow managed to get the government to look the other way for the last 4 years: In its game submission process, it ASKED for the game license number, but it never validated it. It was an open secret for years that you could enter any random number and continue the process. Who knows why the Chinese government was willing to look the other way for Apple for so long.

Until now. Perhaps something about the current international climate caused China to say, "yeah, we're not gonna let this slide anymore." Those are the rumors. Anyway, now Apple has left its developers and customers out in the cold. Starting July 1, the minute you try to update your game, it disappears from the Apple App Store China if you don't have a valid game license. More than 7000 games have been removed so far. They've refused to make any major announcement about this or answer clarifying questions about how this is going to work in practice. Developers have been left to figure this out for themselves.

And how long before the users who invested money in these games realize their game has now disappeared and get angry? It will take a while, because the effect is staggered (only when the developer updates their game). Surely this is by design.

Apple played a dangerous game. You may applaud them for failing to force its app store publishers to capitulate to China's hilarious content restrictions and censorship, but at the end of the day this was a losing game from day one.

Now thousands of developers are left out in the cold, suddenly without their precious China revenue. China only approves about 1500 game licenses a year, so few of these games will be back anytime soon. And as soon as these un-updateable games start breaking, or users uninstall them or upgrade their devices, iOS users will get wise to what has happened. I wonder what effect this will have on Apple's already precarious market share in the world's largest mobile market?

(Full disclosure: I work for a company that helps foreign games get published in China. So I've been following this pretty closely.)

Random number won't work. Apple's been playing this game since 2016 (accepting license numbers, but not verifiying them). The game is now over. The licensing process costs money, takes 6-12 months, and requires you to partner with a Chinese company because foreign companies are not allowed to receive a license. Here's a breakdown of what to do, with links to the full process of getting a China game license: https://www.appinchina.co/how-...