TouchArcade

» see toucharcade.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

by the time i would have signed up to toucharcade, the indie ios gaming era it covered had already turned into the live-service free-to-play landscape nobody really enjoyed reading reviews of (close enough). i never had an ios device through the early app store years, my phones from 2010 onward were android, with a brief sony ericsson windows phone phase i regret. either way, by the time i had an ipad in 2016 the app store top charts were already candy crush and clash royale and the kinda games toucharcade had built its early years writing about (monument valley, papers please) had already shifted off the platform or stopped getting good ios ports.

arnold kim had built macrumors in 2000 as a hobby project that became one of the most-read apple rumor sites on the english-language web. when the iphone launched june 2007 and the sdk announcement followed in march 2008, kim spun up toucharcade two months ahead of the app store opening (july 10 of that year), banking on a year-zero coverage advantage for the new platform. blake patterson was the co-founder. the format borrowed from macrumors: news posts and feature reviews on a weekly cadence, with a podcast that became the toucharcade show alongside.

i actually was not paying attention to the ios gaming press much, but anyway. eli hodapp joined in '09 as editor-in-chief and ran the place through what people now call the indie golden age, roughly '09 to '14. the format worked because indie devs were paying for ad inventory on toucharcade as their primary discovery channel into the app store. when the app store algorithm started favoring in-app-purchase live-service titles over the kinda $4.99 premium releases the indie devs preferred, those devs got squeezed out of the top charts and the ad budgets dried up. in june '15 toucharcade pivoted to a patreon model that asked readers to fund the site directly.

hodapp left in 2019 to co-found gameclub, a curated ios indie-game subscription that tried to revive the kinda games toucharcade had been writing about. jared nelson stepped up as editor and ran the next five years on the patreon plus whatever ad revenue remained. by 2024 the site was running with a skeleton bench (the patreon could not float the team it once had). on september 16 2024 the operation formally ceased, the site was left online as a static archive with no plan for new posts.

~ the dossier ~

~ the patreon pivot ~

the june '15 patreon was one of the early reader-funded shifts for a games publication, predating most of the substack-and-patreon-driven indie-press wave that came later. hodapp pitched it as a 'support journalism that fights for indie games' kinda message, the campaign hit its early goals quickly and floated the site through the indie-ios bottoming-out period. the patreon stayed live through the rest of the site's life, the final months saw it as basically the only meaningful revenue source. for a small ios-gaming-press shop it worked longer than any ad-supported equivalent would have.

~ what got buried with it ~

when toucharcade ceased operations in september '24 the archive of forum threads and the review database was left online but un-curated. the back catalog includes a decade and a half of indie-developer interviews plus app launch coverage, with the kinda early reviews of games that have since become canon (close enough). honestly the wider ios-gaming-press scene is mostly gone now. similar sites like tuaw and 1up-com died years earlier. the format never really transferred to the youtube and twitch coverage model the way pc gaming press did.

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