Recently, after negotiating between the terms and conditions of the policies on the streaming apps and services, Apple has decided to add the accessibility of xCloud and Stadia in its App Store. However, the twist in the story lies in the fact that Microsoft has denied accepting the terms and conditions of the policy.
In words of a spokesperson from Microsoft, the policy which they have denied to accept still continues to provide “a bad experience for customers”. They have strictly restricted themselves in accepting the policy because the bad experience that the policy still continues to provide for the customer does not go well with the established high regard of Microsoft particularly while it comes to providing satisfaction to players.
Meanwhile, the App Store has been going through major scrutiny for its policies like Apple’s 30 percent cut from the revenues of the developer for the presence of the app in the App Store. Along with this, the App Store is also undergoing scrutiny for the restrictions that are imposed on game streaming. Stadia and xClouds, too, got prohibited previously from the App Store because of issues arising out of scrutiny.
Nevertheless, Apple, in recent times has come up to amend the existing policies and reshape it in order to allow a place to xCloud and Stadia into the App Store. Although Apple has decided to mold its existing policies, it has added some conditions as well.
Updates provided by Gamerant, confirms that although the streaming app will restrict the buying of a game by subscribers twice, games must be downloaded individually in a streaming service from the App store.
After going through the policies of the App Store, Microsoft has decided to disagree with its policies on the ground that it has the potential of causing troubles to xCloud users in the future who might want to preserve an entire collection of the game in one place without downloading them individually.
It is not only Microsoft that has faced the issue, almost the same story continued for Epic Games as well. The CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, stated that Apple used to charge a fee of 30% from the developers of the app that decides to use the App Store and added in-app purchase in the mobile version of Fortnite, Epic is the most popular game and one of the most downloaded games on the store. Apple reacted in the most expected way and ended up putting a ban on Fortnite in the App Store. As a report by Tech Times in August, Apple won’t be having any exception regarding its fuss regarding policies with Epic.
The Ban has put millions of Fortnite accounts in a vulnerable condition. They are already experiencing the threat of being deleted. Although Apple has provided Epic Games with few demands, the company has denied agreement with any of them. Moreover, it has filed a lawsuit against Apple. Needless to say that many companies who had faced similar problems in past have turned up in solidarity with Epic Games and Microsoft being one of them.
Amidst all the turmoil, project xCloud probably will get launched soon exclusively on Android devices even though Microsoft, because of the App Store’s previous xCloud ban, did not insist on developing the iOS version. Furthermore, it is very likely of Microsoft to break continuity because of Apple’s recent policy change.