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Google Play killed my game and won't tell me why
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mrkramer 2y agoGame looks awesome....release it on Steam.
- bitbasher 2y agoSteam is a mess. It looks like it would do well on the Switch and you'd make a lot more money on console.
- mrkramer 2y ago>Steam is a mess. Please elaborate? It's the best we have as of today for PC gaming.
- junaru 2y agoMobile shovelware devs hate it because it's a stark reminder that no adult finds value in their product.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y agoI do love this statement
- pie420 2y ago"Why is it so hard to scam people on this platform????"
- ffsm8 2y agoSaying that the Nintendo/Switch developer experience is better then valve/steam... Needs citations to say it mildly.
- bitbasher 2y agoI never said the developer experience was better. I said the money was better. In my experience, a shit game on steam will make 3 figures if you're lucky. A shit game on Switch will make four figures most of the time.
- kadoban 2y ago> In my experience, a shit game on steam will make 3 figures if you're lucky. A shit game on Switch will make four figures most of the time. Is that a good metric? Ideally shit games _should_ make very little money. Don't we want to look at what decent games are making and how they're doing?
- bitbasher 2y agoIf a crap game makes money on the platform, a decent or good game is likely to make more. If you're doing full time game development on your own (like the linked blog post), your metric is probably more along the lines of "which platform is most likely going to give me enough money to not reverse mortgage my home or sell a kidney." Steam is a tough marketplace. Crappy games do really bad. Great games don't do much better. You can sink a 1~3 years in an objectively good game and make $10k. It's a terrifying market for someone doing fulltime game development. My general advice is make smaller games (1-6 months of dev time) and target consoles unless you have a good reason to be on steam.
- oniony 2y agoSwitch is absolutely the worst store I've ever used. There are no useful ways to browse the content and no ratings or reviews on anything.
- glimshe 2y agoNeither does Netflix, Apple TV etc. Many people believe reviews go against the curation paradigm and have their own problems (such as review bombing).
- oniony 2y agoI'm not spending money to watch individual shows on Netflix. If a programme's crap I can just hit stop and watch something else. I assume it's the same on Apple TV. If I'm spending money up front for a product, show, album or game, I actually do want those reviews.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rendall 2y agoThis kind of policy and publicity leads to drops in app quality. Seems quite risky to spend time and money on mobile app development.
- artemonster 2y agoWelcome to dystopia. Your lifeline ends due to some automatic flagging and you are banging your head against semi-automated processes and autogenerated "we are looking into it" replies and the only way forward is a public outcry via blog/HN. I hate this timeline very much. Good luck with your appeal process!
- HideousKojima 2y agoPart of me hopes a breakup of Google will fix this nonsense, another part of me worries it will only make things worse.
- adamc 2y agoIf it makes it worse, the break-up will help the pieces die and be replaced. Or at least make it more likely, absent the huge monopoly advantage.
- mrkramer 2y agoEven Zuckerberg complains that every time they patch some of the Meta's apps on the App Store they need to wait days or weeks in order to get approved. If Facebook and Instagram are not important to Apple and most probably Google too then we can't be surprised that indie devs get cold feet.
- mmmlinux 2y agoI mean, that's good right? They aren't getting special treatment over anyone else.
- HideousKojima 2y agoA company not giving priority to some of their biggest customers/revenue generators/whatever is a sign that there's deeper rot within that company. See the recent fiasco with Mozilla mishandling the uBlock Origin/Lite dev for another example of this.
- billy99k 2y agoThis is the problem with these companies having so much power. I had my Amazon seller account banned over a decade ago for a single bad review. I believe it was a competitor, because I had already refunded the customer and the negativity/review just didn't make sense. There was nobody to talk to and support just redirected me to an inbox that bounced. At time time, it destroyed my business that I had been building on the platform for five years and it took me some time to rebuild (in a different industry and not on anyone's platform). I finally got my account back a few months ago with no explanation.
- adamc 2y agoThis is the kind of thing where some level of regulation might actually improve things.
- CM30 2y agoHmm, perhaps the law should be that any business selling to the public has to provide a way to get human led support/contact someone at the company? Not sure how it'd work for companies whose entire purpose is "ultra cheap product/service without any guarantees" (like many unmanaged hosting providers), but it'd certainly force Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc to actually support their customers in some way or another.
- DrillShopper 2y ago> Not sure how it'd work for companies whose entire purpose is "ultra cheap product/service without any guarantees" (like many unmanaged hosting providers) Hopefully the same way the law works for a company that won't pay above minimum wage - completely destroyed in the legal system. I'm sorry if your business plan doesn't conform with law. Perhaps you should focus on a business plan that does conform with the law.
- glimshe 2y agoThey should at least give companies a premium tier where human support is guaranteed. I suspect they think they are less likely to be sued if they offer no explanation
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- TheJoeMan 2y agoI’m not saying it’s the author’s fault, but their metadata has many “yellow” flags… it looks like a copycat of a popular flash game, the author’s name is atypical, and they admitted to already have 2 strikes on Google Play Console. None of this is their fault, and it’s certainly a false positive. I know they’ve put in hundreds of hours of sweat on the code, but perhaps they could turn their focus to registering a corporation, getting trademark for “anti-idle”, and linking the DUNS to their app store accounts.
- waitforit 2y ago> it looks like a copycat of a popular flash game, the author’s name is atypical That popular flash game is the game of this author. > I am Tukkun, an indie game developer making games since 2008. My most significant work is a PC Flash game I made back in 2009 called Anti-Idle: The Game, uploaded to the website Kongregate.
- piva00 2y agoOr Google could use some of the US$ 50b of profit in a quarter to have better systems and human support for this kind of automated bullshit. How many more hoops will people have to jump through because a company holding a very significant share of the market refuses to provide a basic level of support to people, people that are helping to enrich Google's own ecosystem by developing apps for their platform?
- hindsightbias 2y ago> Alphabet net income for the quarter ending June 30, 2024 was $23.619B, a 28.59% increase year-over-year. Seems like they have a winning strategy. You get what you pay for.
- warkdarrior 2y agoAs a Google shareholder, why should my company waste money on support?
- piva00 2y ago
- trabant00 2y agoA long time ago I operated an email blacklist. Since then I don't just trust by default when people shout "they banned me for absolutely no reason, I swear!". I am not saying anything about this case, I just notice people on HN always take these post as 100 percent true. When money is involved, people get caught and their revenue affected they are capable of spinning the wildest tales.
- pif 2y ago> they banned me for absolutely no reason, I swear! I tend not to believe the "no reason" part, but I still stand on their side when their privileges are revoked without human intervention and without a human customer support agent available by phone.
- elashri 2y agoI tend to always assume that when people say absolutely no reason, they mean no reason provided. What makes it worse is that there is usually no way to know because they cannot even get to talk to someone. I understand that fraud detection people don't want to let their methods public but this became the norm for most/all companies.
- trabant00 2y agoI myself was wrongly banned more than once by automated systems. Google even identified gmail pulling email over pop3 from another gmail account as an attack! Hilariously bad. But think about it from the other perspective. Can they involve a human in every ban? Can they offer human support for appeals? You have nefarious actors with automated systems submitting malware and then automated appeals. How would Google or any other company cope with providing human support in every case?
- adamc 2y agoI get that life experiences give you biases. Those of us who've been blamed for things we definitely didn't do might have the opposite bias. Either way, organizations that cannot communicate why they took certain actions are not to be trusted.
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- Mistletoe 2y agoTrying to talk to a tech giant is like trying to talk to the borg. I don’t know when it became acceptable to just have no customer service or someone to talk to at all.
- ocdtrekkie 2y agoMicrosoft will be selling games on Android next month, Epic will be next year. The solution is competition, and we can thank Tim Sweeney for finally making it happen on mobile.
- hedora 2y agoI honestly can’t tell if the judges in these anti-trust cases intentionally screw up the penalties. Instead of forcing Google to do a thing they already do (allow alternative app stores on android), they could have banned them from distributing apps that require Google Play Services (i.e., all apps must run well on the open source version of android, which must be permissively license, and manufacturers would incur no penalties for shipping other mobile operating systems). That would instantly open the android ecosystem up to competition by making AOSP (and things like Lineage/Graphene) viable competitors.
- ocdtrekkie 2y agoIt's not the judge screwing up, it's you. You are showing incredible "tech nerd" bias by thinking Lineage or Graphene are "competitors" or that they could or will matter. They're nerd hobbies, they affect less than a hundredth of a percent of Android devices, and do not matter. What the judge did ban is a bunch of things Google did you may not have even realized they were doing, like the terms in the MADA agreements all manufacturers like Samsung, LG, etc. were required to sign which prevented any competition and required Play Services. The judge also banned revenue sharing agreements with manufacturers and mobile carriers used to prevent companies from using different search engines or app stores. Nobody, figuratively, will ever care about some custom ROMs. But the judge has broken all of the means Google was using to control device manufacturers.
- faeranne 2y ago> they affect less than a hundredth of a percent of Android devices, and do not matter. 2 reasons I can confidently disagree: 1. Unlike desktop platforms, most android devices cease receiving "official" updates long before the chipset stops receiving updates, thus maintaining them requires an alternative rom. While most people will just buy a new phone, the percent usually on the fence about something like switching from Windows to Linux are gonna be pushed harder into looking into alternatives. 2. Well over 1% of desktop users use Linux. Even if you debate the methods to get the current 4%, there's simply no debate on at least 1%. The two combine to suggest that, on android, there's a very good change that more than 1% of android users are using some rom, and all roms help each other. Don't screw up your otherwise valid argument by trying to "put tech nerds in their place" like that. These roms do matter, even if the judge 100% didn't "screw up". Everything else you said is both true and important, and probably matters more than what parent wanted, but it doesn't diminish the value of the roms, just suggests that parent was misguided.
- anonymousiam 2y agoA few weeks ago, Google Play killed Cheogram (a XMPP communications suite). The details of the "Anti-Idle: Reborn" takedown are quite similar, and there has been some speculation among devs that Google has delegated too much of the app analysis legwork to AI. Disclaimer: I have no relationship with Cheogram, other than being annoyed at Google Play disappearing a useful app for which I paid $5.
- iJohnDoe 2y agoGoogle will leave apps that have viruses, spyware, and malware. They’ll remove legitimate apps. Whoever they outsourced these app reviews to is just sabotaging Google Play.
- tslocum 2y agoProblems like this show why publishing outside of Google Play is necessary. I wrote about why I think F-Droid is the best alternative app store to use. https://rocket9labs.com/post/on-the-importance-of-f-droid/ https://rocket9labs.com/post/on-the-importance-of-f-droid/
- pie420 2y agowhat does it matter if F-Droid has 0.001% of the reach and audience of Google Play Store
- brutal_chaos_ 2y agoChicken and egg. People need to also host on F-Droid to pull more users to F-Droid. Eventually if enough momentum is built towards F-Droid, dropping Google Play wouldn't be too much of an issue. Granted this is a really long longshot, but Google Play could use some serious competition amd the more apps that host on multple app stores, the more likely that is to happen.
- shaftway 2y agoI was a team lead on the Play Store frontend, and I was a developer on the internal meme platform Memegen. Both platforms suffered from the same thought process: "If we tell people exactly how they broke the rules, they'll use that information to try to circumvent our rules next time." Often this takes the form of not even codifying the rules internally (if the rules aren't written down then people can't accidentally or intentionally leak them). And both processes used humans in the loop. Put these two things together and it's a recipe for arbitrary application of the rules. I'm actually surprised he got an actual name associated with the emails. Earlier when working on something else I noticed a post on reddit complaining about something I worked on. I reached out privately to help the person and they publicly thanked me without redacting my email address. I ended up getting death threats for a Google product completely unrelated. Not unlike https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/02/19/i-will-slaughter-you/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/02/19/i-will-slaughter-you/
- thinkingemote 2y agoLooking at the page and the faq it appears that the app uses micro transactions and in app currency that people can buy. Has it's own ads too. “free game with ads and microtransactions” A bell is ringing. It's probably due to this. Platforms want you to use their systems to make money for them they want their cut. At least if I was the developer I would guess that this might be a major factor. Epic.