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Google Play killed my game and won't tell me why

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Re: Google Play killed my game and won't tell me why

#51

Post by glimshe »

CM30 wrote: post #35
adamc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the kind of thing where some level of regulation might actually improve things.

Hmm, 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.

They 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

Re: Google Play killed my game and won't tell me why

#52

Post by glimshe »

oniony wrote: post #24
bitbasher wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam is a mess. It looks like it would do well on the Switch and you'd make a lot more money on console.

Switch 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.

Neither does Netflix, Apple TV etc. Many people believe reviews go against the curation paradigm and have their own problems (such as review bombing).

Re: Google Play killed my game and won't tell me why

#53

Post by mindslight »

hedora wrote: post #39
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #26

Microsoft 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.

I 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 n…

When these topics reach the mainstream breaking point, I swear things invariably end up going the wrong way. Look at the current movement to "break up Google" into independent verticals that will still each have their own network effects. Effective anti-trust would be focusing on separating the markets for hosted services from that for client software, by forcing their debundling with open APIs and whatnot.

I think it has to do with the difference between top-down and bottom-up perspective. Top-down politicians/regulators/courts/whatnot end up looking at these things of how they can be contained and controlled (regardless of how they will continue wielding the leverage that allows them to dominate their specific market), whereas bottom up we look at what it would actually take to actually create some competition (despite such attempts inherently looking like baby steps at the start).

Re: Google Play killed my game and won't tell me why

#55

Post by willcipriano »

adamc wrote: post #21
billy99k wrote: post #8

This 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…

This is the kind of thing where some level of regulation might actually improve things.

We may also want to popularize the idea of not building you business with someone else's platform. If people were more skeptical of these firms in the last few decades they wouldn't have gotten off the ground in the first place.

Re: Google Play killed my game and won't tell me why

#56

Post by kadoban »

bitbasher wrote: post #46
ffsm8 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that the Nintendo/Switch developer experience is better then valve/steam... Needs citations to say it mildly.

I 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.

> 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?

Re: Google Play killed my game and won't tell me why

#58

Post by pie420 »

tslocum wrote: post #57

Problems 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/

what does it matter if F-Droid has 0.001% of the reach and audience of Google Play Store

Re: Google Play killed my game and won't tell me why

#59

Post by HideousKojima »

hackable_sand wrote: post #49
HideousKojima wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 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.

The size of a paycheck has zero dictation of priority What dumbbells are out here optimizing for that?

Are you serious?

Suppose you're running a company, and you have two clients. One brings you $20,000 in profit a year, the other brings in $600,000 a year. Both of them have some sort of issue they need to resolve and report it to you at almost the exact same time. Let's say the smaller company reports it slightly earlier. But you only have enough manpower to solve the issues one at a time. Whose do you solve first?

The incredibly obvious answer to 99% of people is to solve it for the company that brings you 30 times more profit than the other. Any other answer is a sign of severe dysfunction and or insanity in the company.

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