Niko Partners foresees a lot of growth for China's mobile games.
Niko Partners foresees a lot of growth for China's mobile games.
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Apple has removed almost 42,000 games so far in App Store licensing purge in China

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 1 min

To comply with Chinese law, Apple has removed nearly 42,000 games from the App Store in China since July 1 because these apps didn’t have proper licenses.

Market researcher Niko Partners found that Apple removed 14,914 games in July ahead of a July 31 deadline to comply with a 2016 regulation that requires games to have a publishing license (International Standard Book Number, or ISBN) to operate in China. It removed another 26,815 games August 1.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.