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Comment by smogcutter | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of folks looking at this from the point of view of an adult gamer are missing the point: the audience for this is parents.

For 10 bucks (or whatever) a month you can load the ipad up with games and not worry about microtransactions or scummy ads targeting your kids. "Curated" is a signal that can trust age recommendations and not worry about inappropriate content.

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As an adult gamer (emphasis on adult, i.e. not a 30-something that still games like a 16-something), I'd say I'm the audience as well.

People who like casual gaming too.

I’m a casual gamer and parent and the freemium, ad sponsored and subscription games have put me off gaming completely. I’m not sure I’d spend monthly, but let see what comes out. I miss the days of trying a game and buying it once if you like it.

Then they should know, that children want to play popular games, that change all the time.

I'm pretty sure that Apple will have problems with remaining their cut of the 9,99€ / month. If some f2P games aren't included, because the deal is not interesting enough for the publisher/game developer. EA, Nintendo, Niantic ( Google), Zynga, Epic and Microsoft won't partner up also.

Kids don't want to play curated games, they want to play what is popular or what they really want.

It's not like going to kid-friendly restaurants where you pick the destination. It's Minecraft, PUBG or even Farming Simulator ( my brother is buying an Xbox with only that game for his son) that they want to play this moment. They are not going to wait till Apple has the permission to publish it in the arcade service.

Children also need to get acquainted with the concept of scarcity if you don’t want them to become spoiled.

Limiting their options between “no games at all” or “the few games that Apple provides” is a good way to teach them that particular lesson.

Anyway, you can always gift them the popular game on a special date like their birthday or Christmas.

I (35 years old, grew up playing PC and GameBoy games since the late 80s) had no trouble accepting that the games I can play are either the once per year birthday presents or whatever pirated floppy my friends at school gave me that worked on a PC XT clone with a monochrome monitor (and lot of those that worked played way too slow on my computer).

This. My friends'kids constantly pick up my phones and ask to game on it. Sometimes they don't know what they are doing and decide to spend my in game money ( Like Stars or Gems or something ) to play.

Having a $10 Subscription allows them to mess around with all the games without me having the hassle to think and worry about what they do with it. I am not a causal gamer, but I see this will have lots of appeal. 10M sign up would be $100M per month.

Curated like Youtube Kids?

Specifically not like YouTube Kids. Apple makes a big deal about "human recommendations" as a jab to Google's (questionable) attempts to handle kids recommendations/filtering with machine learning.

A library of game titles is much easier to monitor than an open video site.

It shouldn't be marketed to kids in that case. If YouTube Kids was simply YouTube, most parents wouldn't expose their kids to it. Calling it YouTube Kids and then not monitoring it for malicious content is wrong.

I don't think he was giving YouTube a pass, I think he was saying Apple has a much better shot at curating a game store.

Example, in the game Defender of the Crown (the PC one, not the Atari) all one has to block is the after-the-marrage-gif that implies sexual activity and the game is good to go.

I didn't like so much the cinemaware rendition, I liked the original raid more.

YouTube kids is very much not curated. That's why I don't use it anymore. I stick with Netflix, PBS, Disney, Hulu, pretty much anyone other than YouTube, because YouTube is the only one I've found that's dumb enough to claim they have a kid safe area without actually curating it.

One can even say it is so egregious they could and should face legal challenges.

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