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

antiidlereborn.com

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

#61

Post by brutal_chaos_ »

pie420 wrote: post #58
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

Chicken 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.

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

#62

Post by indymike »

trabant00 wrote: post #17

A 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.

> Since then I don't just trust by default when people shout "they banned me for absolutely no reason, I swear!".

Email shenanigans and the shenaniganiers will quickly erode any sense of faith in your common man. That said, it's easy to believe these stories after dealing with support at any number of big tech companies.

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

#63

Post by bitbasher »

kadoban wrote: post #56
bitbasher wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If 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.

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

#64

Post by tdeck »

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…

It's hard to square this with the Amazon of today where sellers openly sell fake products or change the listing from one product to another and seem to face no consequences.

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

#65

Post by shaftway »

I 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/

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

#66

Post by faeranne »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #47
hedora wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It'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…

> 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.

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

#67

Post by arp242 »

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?

Every serious business will prioritize a customer that brings in a lot of money over a customer than brings in very little money. You should do right by both, yes, because it's the right thing to do, and small customers turn in to big customers so it also makes business sense.

But you don't just leave a big customer hanging for days or weeks, because they might get annoyed with you and go to $competitor which will seriously impact you. No serious business treats their big customers that, and it's a sign of dysfunction if they do.

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

#68

Post by arp242 »

trabant00 wrote: post #17

A 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.

Yeah, some of these stories that get posted here definitely have more going on than the author admits. Some, not all.

But like with email blacklists, false positives do happen, and are probably quite common. Mistakes happen and that's okay because all of this is a hard problem. For email this is usually not too hard to rectify this. For Google Play ... not so much.

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

#69

Post by ocdtrekkie »

faeranne wrote: post #66
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'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…

> 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…

I would contend that even if 1% of users were to notice or care that their phone didn't get the latest security updates anymore, the vast majority of those users wouldn't do anything at all to remedy that issue.

Look, most Android devices are held by people who would be hard-pressed to tell you which model of phone they have, and almost certainly can't find the place to see what version of Android it is running.

Most people will use their tech until it breaks and then get something new and use it until it breaks, which is why automatic updates are pushed so aggressively now.

My personal opinion of roms is that because they do not offer freedom to the masses, it is elitist to focus on them. And insofar as choice in the ecosystem is, roms are actively harmful: They've wasted decades of volunteer developer-hours protecting Android's control of the ecosystem, when those developer-hours could've been invested in real mobile Linux or another option not encumbered by Google's proprietary stench.

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

#70

Post by TiredOfLife »

trabant00 wrote: post #17

A 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.

I could understand this worldview if talking about some random unknown person. But this is creator of Anti Idle - a game with million+ players and a pretty sizeable TV Tropes page.

Similar situation with the creator of uBlock Origin (8+ million installs on Firefox and 39 million on Chrome) Being treated like shit by Mozilla (uBlock Origin is sole reason people still use Firefox)

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