The Monday Musing - Why the indie initiative on the App Store is so important

By , on March 20, 2017

It's a move that's been a long time coming, but last week's Indie games take over of the App Store is probably one of the most important things to happen in mobile gaming over the last couple of years.

Not just because it means that we got a whole load of really excellent games in such a short space of time, but because it shows that Apple is finally starting to take gaming seriously on its platform.

And that fact has been cemented by Apple adding a permanent indie games showcase to the front page of the App Store. Gaming on mobile is starting to get the recognition that it deserves.

Indie 4 life

Now, we all know that there have been some truly excellent indie games on the App Store over the past few years. But we know that because we're the sort of people who write and read a gaming site called AppSpy.

The new section on the Featured page will hopefully open up some of these experiences to a new audience. And that can only be a good thing. More people playing things like The Room and Monument Valley could lead to a change of perception about mobile gaming.

Because right now, in the mainstream at least, there's a very real feeling that free to play shovelware is the core of the mobile gaming infrastructure.

Subscribe to AppSpy on

And while that may well be true in a monetary sense - don't expect to see the likes of Euclidean Lands or Pavilion knocking Game of War of Clash Royale off the top spots in the top grossing charts anytime soon - there's so much more to mobile gaming than IAPs and adverts.

As well as changing that long held view of mobile gaming as a distraction rather than a legitimate form of digital entertainment, there's another string to this new indie game initiative's bow.

And that's that it's showing devs that iOS is a platform that's not just welcoming to indie games, but one that actively supports them.

Hopefully that's going to lead to more and more innovative games hitting the App Store. And I for one think that that can only ever be a good thing.

The free to play ecosystem isn't going away, not while it keeps in raking the cash, but Apple looks like it's finally understood that there's room for more than one way to play on iOS.