First-order effects

• Crescent Moon's Ravensword: The Fallen King misses its anticipated release window despite days of built-up forum anticipation on Touch Arcade, with developer Russ Menapace left waiting on Apple rather than shipping.
• The batch nature of the rejections — many Unity-powered games hit at once — points to an engine-level problem in review, meaning every Unity developer with a title currently in Apple's queue is stalled, not just Ravensword's team.

Second-order effects

• Unity's position as iPhone middleware is now on trial in public: studios choosing an engine for their next project have a fresh data point that picking Unity adds App Store rejection risk beyond their own code quality.
• The rejection lands the same week Apple won its Psystar summary judgment, turned away a congressional-caricature app, and posted a job listing for a AAA-caliber game engineer (a rumored signal of first-party ambitions) — together raising the volume of developer calls for clearer review criteria.

Third-order effects

• If single-point App Store review keeps stalling whole toolchains, middleware vendors like Unity become structurally dependent on a gatekeeper process they neither control nor can predict, pushing them toward closer certification work with Apple before submission.
• A pattern of high-profile arbitrary rejections strengthens the long-run case for published review guidelines and appeal mechanisms, since each incident like this one hands critics of Apple's closed distribution model concrete evidence.