Antstream Arcade has made itself known as a cloud gaming service that is focused on the niche of retro gaming. They offer over 1400 games in the reto gaming space, but with some notable removals over the last month and more notable removals planned, a narrative is emerging that Antstream Arcade is hurting. So, let’s discuss why that’s not actually the case.
As Games Leave, Other Games Arrive
The big kick-off of this situation was back when it was announced that Warner Bros Games was pulling 27 games from Antstream Arcade. With recent news of 63 other retro games, including a number of games from Codemasters, there seems to be concern about games leaving Antstream. For those wondering why after three years of licensing Codemasters and Warner Bros Games are pulling or have pulled their games off Antstream Arcade, it comes down to licensing agreements and the fact that Codemasters and Warner Brothers have both been acquired by bigger companies (Electronic Arts and Discovery Inc respectively) over the last few years. Certainly, this doesn’t help.
Antstream Arcade has a lot of “quarters” up its sleeve however as they have support from dozens of indie developers as well as Piko Interactive, Namco, and Atari who have all provided dozens of games to Antstream and in the case of Atari, actually own a percentage (10%) of Antstream. Now, while indie games as well as the libraries of Atari, Piko, and Namco may not be enough for some people, to me the fact new games seem to hit Antstream every week is enough. I don’t care if they aren’t the “heavy hitters” that some gamers so crave.
Every Other Service Removes Games
Okay, let’s talk about the other big reason why you shouldn’t stress about games leaving Antstream: That’s the fact that all major game subscription services add and remove games rather frequently. Some notable cloud gaming services that remove games include Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, PlayStation Plus Premium, and especially Amazon Luna. With it being a common occurrence for cloud gaming services to remove games, I don’t think it is an especially big deal that Antstream Arcade removes them, other than Antstream Arcade making claims about how they are a platform focused on game preservation.
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