Apple might follow its mysterious streaming service with a mysterious game service

Video game fans dream of someday being allowed to pay a subscription fee to get access to a huge supply of games (a.k.a. “the Netflix model”) but so far nobody has actually pulled it off—except for Microsoft with its Game Pass service on the Xbox One, but some people like PlayStation more than Xbox so that doesn’t count. Anyway, the true savior of subscription-based game-delivery platforms may come in an unexpected form, at least if a new report from financial news organization Cheddar is anything to go by.

The Cheddar story says that “five people familiar with the matter” have confirmed that Apple is planning some kind of subscription service for games that would allow users to pay a flat fee for “a bundled list of titles.” Apple supposedly began talking about this with game developers late last year, so it’s all probably still early, and Cheddar even covers its ass by noting that Apple could end up decided to abandon this idea. Also, the company reportedly talked to some game developers about coming on board as a publisher, meaning it might start putting out its own games.

Of course, we don’t know anything about what kind of games Apple might offer or how much it might charge for this thing, but it is interesting that Cheddar refers to “game developers” and not “app developers”—implying, purposefully or not, that we’re talking about people who make actual games and not just phone games. Also, whether or not this plan is real, there’s a very good chance we won’t hear anything official for a long time. Apple has been developing a streaming service for a long time, and as we’ve pointed out over and over and over again, we still know absolutely nothing about that beyond which big name creators are developing shows for it.