TouchArcade Is Shutting Down
Many of you who have followed TouchArcade for a long time are well aware that we’ve had financial troubles for many years now, and to be frank I think it’s a miracle that we’ve been able to last as long as we have. The truth of the matter is that a website like ours just doesn’t make money anymore. To our own detriment we’ve resisted things like obnoxious in-your-face advertising, egregious clickbait headlines, or ethically questionable sponsorships, which sadly are the types of things that actually still make money in the internet of today.
There are a number of other reasons that have contributed to us reaching this point, but I’d rather not get into all that right now. TouchArcade was an institution for many millions of people over the past 16 years, and it was my full-time job for the last 14+ years.
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If there is some sort of silver lining to all of this, it’s that for the foreseeable future all of the content that has ever been posted to TouchArcade will remain online and accessible to all. More than 33,000 published articles, including more than 4,000 game reviews, not to mention all of our yearly Best Of content and Game of the Year picks. These should hopefully all continue living on into the future for reference purposes and just to look back and see how drastically the mobile gaming landscape changed over the last decade and a half.
Just saw this - pretty sad reflection on the state of iOS gaming that the marquee iOS game review site couldn’t afford to keep the lights on.
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I think this says more about media consumption than the state of iOS gaming. I.e., people want to see video reviews, not read some text on a website. Not even sure what this says about iOS gaming at all.
While I personally can't say to have ever visited TouchArcade, I think Apple made a huge disservice both to the developer community and customers when they shut down the affiliate referral program 6 years ago; there were websites I used to visit that recommended apps with their business model being more referral revenue than ads, and it was useful to me as a User, and would have been as developer. And what did they save really from this, cents on additional downloads that maybe don't even happen without those websites' service?
