An odd case of disappearance has hit Apple Arcade. For one brief, shining moment on December 17, My Talking Tom 2+ visited the platform… and was gone almost as quickly as it arrived. No farewell tour. No patch notes. No dramatic goodbye post from a sad cartoon cat. Just… poof. Removed the very next day, as if it had never happened. It never had a chance to join our list of the best Apple Arcade games. Naturally, we can't let this mystery go unnoticed, so we have to investigate. What happened to dearest darling, Talking Tom?
If the blink-and-you'll-miss-it event passed you by, My Talking Tom 2+ is the Apple Arcade version of Outfit7's absurdly successful virtual pet game. It's the one where you feed Tom, bathe Tom, dress Tom, play mini-games with Tom, watch Tom make deeply unsettling baby noises, and slowly realize you're emotionally invested in a fictional grey cat. The typical kind of game you would find on Apple Arcade, cute, cozy, kid-friendly, and adult-friendly in a gently regressive sort of way.
Which is exactly why its sudden disappearance is so odd.
Usually, when a game hits Apple Arcade, it stays a while. That's kind of the deal. Even when titles eventually leave the service, there's a bit of warning, a little dignity, a gentle digital transition. My Talking Tom 2+ instead chose the path of the trickster spirit: arriving unannounced, departing immediately, and refusing to elaborate like that guy you had one chemistry-filled date with and then suddenly ghosts you for no reason. So… what happened?
Officially? Nothing. No public explanation, no dramatic licensing fallout (that we know of, send us a message if you have some gossip), no ominous "due to unforeseen circumstances" tweet. We can speculate wildly, because that's the true spirit of mobile games journalism.
Maybe it was a technical issue? A broken build, a catastrophic bug, or a backend problem that turned Tom into some kind of eldritch horror. Maybe it was a licensing hiccup, with paperwork summoning Tom before the summoning circle was complete. Or maybe, and this is my personal favorite, someone at Apple Arcade accidentally hit "publish" instead of "preview" and spent the next 24 hours quietly screaming into his colleague's scarf (I do that all the time).
There's also the possibility that this was a soft launch that wasn't meant to be seen, like a rehearsal where the curtain went up, and everyone froze mid-costume change.
Whatever the reason, Tom's brief escape into the Apple Arcade ecosystem has already entered the mobile gaming hall of fame for "strangest cameos." Will he return? Maybe. Will we ever get a proper explanation? Almost certainly not. Some mysteries are meant to remain mysteries. When have cats ever given explanations for their odd ways? Sometimes they just grant us with a little rub against our legs before disappearing, and we should just be grateful they noticed us at all.