I never personally had the best experience with Pinball Arcade on my iPad vs. the PC but your mileage may vary. I definitely recommend you play the free table on iOS for a while to see how you like the controls vs. PC.

I would also expect them to do deep discounts on stuff close to the date they are pulled, so probably wait.

I'd recommend playing them on Steam as it's better with a controller. If you have a controller for your Phone/Tablet then maybe you can get the best of both worlds but my recommendation is to play the game with a controller wherever that is most convenient for you.

Unfortunately that won't happen due to licensing obligations from what i hear.

FarSight has stated that previous owners of the tables will be able to play them indefinitely. New owners interested in grabbing these soon to be delisted pins will need to pay full price, as FarSight’s licensing agreement have barred them from offering any discounts. The seven current seasons are $30 a pop on Steam, although individual tables and two packs can be purchased from inside the game.

TechRaptor.net

@sin4profit: Yeah I've got a 8bitdo controller that in theory works with iOS, but I haven't tried it yet, I'll let you know when I do.

Edit: Apparently 8bitdo controllers no longer work with iOS, that's annoying.

Steam.

Going to toss this out there, since Pinball Arcade has the licensing stuff going on:

You can always put together a PC running legacy software if for reason Pinball Arcade no longer works under a certain flavor of Windows. Then, get weird and build a fake pinball table out of a 75" display.

If Apple pushes out an iOS update that bricks Pinball Arcade, outside of waiting for dev support, you have nothing. I have a pretty large library of stuff I bought on iPad that just flat out won't run anymore.

This, I think.

You can apply legacy compatibility settings to Steam games directly on the game program files. I've found Win 10 to be better than Win XP for being able to play old games without even needing to do that. Besides that, some of the tables look really great with a larger screen. Trying to follow the balls might be difficult on a mobile device, esp. in multiball, but then I wish I could put my monitor in portrait mode (it's ultra wide for a start).

@sin4profit: Thanks, hope that's the case then. Was going to wait but may get some sooner rather than later myself.

So I ended up going for steam partially for this reason (I too have iOS games I spent money to buy that no longer run) but also because it turns out that the season packs are about £5 cheaper on PC than iOS.

Better controls also helped the decision.

Only bought season one so far, but I'm having a great time and plan to buy more before the time is up!

What really strikes me is how different the tables feel, I play real pinball so infrequently and I don't think I've ever played more than 2 tables back to back so I though they all felt fairly much the same, but theres a great variety of speeds and styles!

I'll say you're more likely to be able to play your Steam games in 5-10 years than your iOS purchases, considering Apple has a habit of randomly dropping support for older software. Not sure Steam is still growing as a platform these days, but I don't see it suddenly closing down, and backwards compatibility generally isn't problem in Windows, at least not as a brick wall where there's no way to get old stuff running again unless it's using some bad DRM or requires a constant online connection, which I don't think Pinball Arcade does.