Apple Arcade has barely been live a month, and already its first big competitor has reared its head.
GameClub is a new all-you-can-play mobile gaming subscription. Like Apple Arcade, it’s home to over 50 exclusive games with absolutely no ads or in-app purchases, and it costs $5/month. So what’s the difference?
The key is that while Arcade is pushing brand new games developed for the service, GameClub instead is looking to the last ten years of mobile gaming for modern classics. It has revitalized an impressive suite of well-loved mobile games that, until now, had dropped off the face of the App Store. As such there are some familiar titles here that we thought were lost forever – including plenty that fell as part of the great 32-bit app-ocalypse of 2017.
GameClub offers a single bundle of great games. From its press release:
“Curated by former TouchArcade editor-in-chief Eli Hodapp, GameClub’s diverse catalog includes many of the highest-rated mobile games on Metacritic, with multiple titles that topped Apple’s own game-of-the-year lists. GameClub is the only place to find these titles, which in aggregate have been downloaded by over 100 million players. Each game is playable without an internet connection and downloaded – not streamed – directly from the App Store.”
Casual gamers may balk at the thought of two gaming subscriptions, but neither ties you into a long contract so we’d advise chopping and changing as you get tired of each service’s catalog. Of course, they both offer one-month free trials, so there’s nothing to stop you giving GameClub a try right now to see how many of its titles appeal.
If you still can’t decide, we’ll be digging into the service over the next few weeks and will be back with more in-depth analysis of the quality on show here – but our early impressions, like they were with Arcade, are very good.