Games are definitely “complete” after a while., sometimes on first release. If they continue to work on the OS, the only reason Apple is dropping them is because they want the developer to give them another $99. The busywork this creates is a headache for everyone except Apple.

> Games are definitely “complete” after a while.

More importantly for better than or worse it’s just not how game lifecycles and financing go.

$99 from a few developers is meaningless to both Apple and the developer of a game. It's like 40 minutes of wages for an average engineer. Apple doesn't want to have to support old bugs and poor API choices in perpetuity.

What makes you think it's only a few and not large scale? And why would forcing a developer to update their feature-complete game result in stopping support of "old bugs and poor API choices"? There is no requirement to update the API level. Read the article.

Simply rebuilding and resubmitting the app with a new version of Xcode will yield a significantly different binary artifact today than a few years ago.

It isn't necessarily about API level, it could be (from time to time) about going from arm32 to arm64, to adding better-optimized builds for new microarchitectures, getting bitcode that's recompiled by Apple to support app thinning. Apple may deprecate or remove APIs from time to time that should also be addressed.

That there wasn't necessarily, specifically, a change this time doesn't mean that this program isn't about supporting that over time. It's much easier to make such changes if developers are in the habit of periodically making updates vs. being told to make a breaking update out of the blue.

You really think the $99 a year from developers would incentivize anything?

And before you quote the number of “registered developers”, all of those aren’t paying developers.

1,000,000 paying developers is $99 million in revenue -- every year. This is easily an incentive for Apple.

In your grandparent comment, you said it costs everyone but Apple. Apple has manual reviewers. It would be much cheaper if all those apps didn’t have to go through the app review process. You think Apple changes their APIs willy nilly just to collect $99 a year?