No More Play Store

This is just a quick announcement that I will never be putting games on the Play Store / App Store again.

I have tried, oh so hard, to get my games on there and keep them on there for the past few years. My games are incredibly simple. I do nothing strange, require no weird permissions, nothing of the sort. And still the stores find vague reasons to throw them off the platform.

I appeal the decision, they deny without actually giving more specific information about how to fix it.

I need to regularly go through the incredibly slow and painful building step for the game just to update it to some latest SDK or tweak one built-in setting, because the store has changed its rules and now demands it.

And even then, when I have literally done exactly as asked, they might refuse and throw all my games off their store whenever they feel like it.

One time they literally removed two of my games because of “plagiarism”. I had to send them an email that basically said “I am the creator of 100% of the content of these games, I can give you the source code and files, why on earth are you even thinking otherwise?” Fortunately, that time, this restored the games a few days later.

That’s just the games without ads. The few of them where I tried to implement AdMob have fared even worse. Again, I do nothing strange. I show a rewarded video when the user wants it (and actively taps the button they want to see it to get a certain reward), which is as restricted as possible (so no mature content, no tracking, bla bla). But nope, tons of extra rules to follow, which keep changing, and then they randomly remove them regularly because it had supposedly shown an inappropriate ad or something.

It’s ludicrous how AdMob treats their users like they’re always about to break the law or commit murder, while giving you 0.01 cents for an ad. (All my life, all my ad-supported games combined, I’ve only made like 20 bucks total.)

As much as I can, I’ve always played it safe and checked everything worked as intended. That has never made my life any easier, and after all those years, I am certain it is a waste of time and I can never actually expect my mobile games to stay on the platform without frequent effort and frustration on my end.

Even a simple puzzle game, that has no ads and does not track anything, and they know that because of their control of the platform and strict rules, is randomly removed. And I’m merely pointed to a vague list of privacy guidelines or app content guidelines, while mailing them feels like talking to a tree. A dumb tree at that. A malignant tree that somehow wants to kick the creators that make the platform possible in the first place into the dirt and waste their time and energy. (Except for the few creators, of course, who clearly break the app store’s rules but make them a looot of money.)

So I am done!

I will still create mobile games, especially once I get better hardware and my current schedule clears up. But they will simply be downloadable from my website or Itch.io, and they will always have a desktop/browser/non-mobile version too. And they’ll never contain ads again, which, if we’re honest, I’d never expected to make any sort of money anyway.

That was my public service announcement,

Pandaqi