9-Year-Old Visual Novel Runs Just Fine But Apple Is Booting It From The App Store Anyway

Wheels of Aurelia is a 2016 visual novel about a young woman on a road trip in 1970s Italy and the people she meets along the way, and it’s about to get delisted from the App Store. Developer Santa Ragione says Apple is doing that because the game hasn’t been updated in years, even though it’s feature-complete and runs just fine on modern iPhones, accusing the tech giant of undermining “cultural and artistic products” with arbitrary policies.

“Despite multiple appeals and sincere efforts to seek clarification, Apple has not provided clear justification for this removal, citing only their policy to remove apps deemed ‘obsolete’ or ‘outdated,’ despite the game being fully functional and compliant with current technical standard,” Studio co-founder and director Pietro Righi Riva told Game Developer.

“We firmly believe that removing fully functional artistic works simply due to infrequent updates undermines the value and sustainability of games as cultural and artistic products,” he continued. Like books, films, and music albums, video games represent complete creative works that do not inherently require continual updates beyond maintaining basic functionality.”

Wheels of Aurelia is one of eight adventure, visual novel, and experimental indie games Santa Ragione has released over the years, including 2023’s frequently overlooked Saturnalia, a haunting survival horror that mixes maze-like puzzles with Italian folklore. Wheels of Aurelia will remain available on consoles and PC, but the studio is making the game free to download on iPhone until Apple kicks it off the storefront on July 25.

“Updating Wheels of Aurelia at this stage would demand very significant resources solely to refresh engine and SDK elements without providing meaningful enhancements to user experience or artistic value,” the studio wrote in its appeal to Apple, but multiple requests doesn’t appear to have swayed the manufacturer from delisting the game. Apple has come under increasing fire for monopolistic App Store practices that cost developers billions in fees while providing little value in return.