Bayonetta dev's Apple Arcade exclusive World of Demons will no longer be playable next month
No reason was given as to why the game is being delisted.
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PlatinumGames' Apple Arcade exclusive title World of Demons is having its service ended, and is being completely delisted January 18.
Earlier this week, PlatinumGames shared a short blog post where it announced that World of Demons will soon no longer be playable. "World of Demons will no longer be available to download on Apple Arcade as of January 18, 2024," reads the post, before going on to note that from February 1, even if you have the game downloaded, you won't be able to play it at all. PlatinumGames also wrote that it extends its "gratitude to all players who have enjoyed the game since release."
That really is all of the details provided in the blog post, and it doesn't explain the reasoning behind the game being removed from Apple Arcade. Typically Apple Arcade exclusives are such as Apple partially funds the games available on the service, which will be why World of Demons isn't available on any other platform. It's always possible that Apple only paid for exclusivity for a certain period of time, but outside of that, who knows why it might be getting delisted.
World of Demons only launched just under a couple of years ago in April 2021, and as is typical of most PlatinumGames titles, it's an action game, sporting a visual style that's quite similar to Okami - an action-adventure game developed by PlatinumGames co-founder Hideki Kamiya.
This obviously isn't great from a preservation perspective, as there just simply isn't any other way to play the game. Hopefully PlatinumGames will decide to release the game elsewhere, though given the general games industry's ineptitude when it comes to preservation, I don't have much faith.
PlatinumGames future is a little uncertain at the moment, as back in October Kamiya actually left the studio he helped setup. That leaves Project GG, a title Kamiya was directing, as the only project the developer has in development that anyone's aware of, and it's uncertain if it's still in the works now that he has left.