>Today I received an email from Google Play Support stating that Luck be a Landlord has been geo-blocked in the following countries: United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Iran, Jordan, South Korea, Libya, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen.
>According to Google, the app "contains content that doesn't comply with the Gambling policy."
> It should go without saying that I 100% disagree with this decision. Luck be a Landlord does not violate any gambling policy that Google has in their terms of service.
I don't think its saying it violates google's gambling policy, it violates the gambling policy of those countries
I'm not an expert but as I understand it, laws are a component of policy. By at least one definition policy broadly encompasses how those laws are implemented, and enforced, as well as regulations that aren't technically part of legal code.
It's a nitpicky distinction, but an important one, and one I wouldn't have even been concerned about had you not taken the Very Smart tone.
What is on the books, as a criminal or civil violation, and what are the policies of the local gaming commission, as well as what's actually enforced on the ground, mean that laws differ from policy. It sounds like Google may be complying where they're not legally required to or wouldn't face fines for.
But the game is just a game, there is no gambling. You don't pay money or get money... well you buy the game, but the slot machine aspect is a game mechanic, the same as an RPG will have a dice roll in the background and check against your stats and buffs.
It's not a question of whether or not it's harmless. It seems to me that it plainly violates the "apps that simulate gambling" clause. It looks and plays like a slot machine. That's different from Jetpack Joyride, which is a side scroller that has a brief slot-machine element that's not really central to the gameplay. Almost all video games have random elements but they're not gambling themed. I'm not Muslim but my understanding is that the Qur'an views gambling with the same level of condemnation as it views consumption of alcohol. Games with nudity/sexual content, homosexual characters, alcohol, gambling, etc., are (unfortunately in my opinion) banned in multiple Islamic nations.
As long as we're on the subject, the Google Play storefront of this app is very much lacking in any reason why someone should want to plunk down US$5 for it. Maybe an embed of the release video? For that matter the release video itself could benefit from having a voiceover that explains a little of what's going on and makes it sound fun.
In strict implementations of Islam, the forbidden practice is "games of chance", rather than "financial betting", so a virtual slot-machine (or even a real slot machine that doesn't accept coins) is forbidden in the same way a real slot machine is.
They also offer variable rewards with apparent (virtual) value given the same input.
Or do the policymakers care mainly about how the chance is presented?
I am aware that you are probably not directly involved with whatever ratings board is relevant, and probably can't respond authoritatively, but if you could indulge my idle curiosity it would be really cool.
I think its roughly the same with MPAA rating system when it steps into "adult themes", etc. A movie can show all the same scenes and still not be rated the same because they can be framed as tangential or they can have the main role model dependent on a casino for income, needing alcohol like Popeye needs spinach and saying their calling in life is the perfect one night stand.
Simulated slot machines aren't appropriate in games marketed/sold to children. They're on the same level of inappropriate sleaze as "candy cigarettes" (which you may not have heard of before, because they're rightly banned in many countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candy_cigarette#Sales_laws)
The problem is absolutely the laws of those countries. Arguing "but you allow X" will just get X also banned, not make them see the light that the law is unjust.
> Luck be a Landlord is a roguelike deckbuilder about using a slot machine to earn rent money and defeat capitalism. This game does not contain any real-world currency gambling or microtransactions.
One of least effective ways to argue your case is by pointing to other apps that have the same violations. I say that having submitted 50+ apps across various categories and dealing with thousands of app review exchanges to get them released. You can find apps that violate all sorts of guidelines and laws and it is super frustrating when yours gets blocked but it is part of the business.
Did they slip by a reviewer that didn't care? Did they use their "VC" illuminati connections? Are they such a big player the rules don't apply? It doesn't really matter or have anything to do with getting YOUR app released and the reviewer you are talking to will most likely ignore that completely.
Your best bet is to remove or change the mechanic if possible, resubmit, and then add it back in during a future update if you feel strongly about it.
It is possible those other apps have something that allows them to keep it... and by communicating nicely and earnestly with your reviewer you might find a way to skirt the rules, if a way exists. For us, it was frequently tweaking copy or TOS or other minor changes that allowed us to release an app with only superficial changes that the initial review made it seem like we were totally screwed. I do get the instinct to just say FU though.
It might not be very effective or in the author's best interest to make this point to Google. But my assumption is that the author has already made that attempt and now, after that remedy has failed has decided to make an open appeal.
It is perfectly proper to make this point to HN readers and the general public who know nothing about the situation. It absolutely is relevant that Google do not appear to be applying their policies in a consistent and fair manner and as such are haphazardly fulfilling their consumer promise of operating "safe and secure" app stores.
Spilling conflict into the public sphere is the new way to "turbo" unreasonable disagreements these days. Everyone does it from cable and satellite companies down to individuals getting shit on by a corporate behemoth. Though I find it distasteful, so long as it keeps working, people will keep doing it.
What other things that are wrong and avoidable (being acts of humans rather than acts of nature) do you advocate just tolerating without even so much as reporting of discussing?
Animals must live with the environment as it is. Humans modify their environment to suit them.
It's ok to be fatalist for yourself. There is no valid reason to try to tell anyone else to be.
I think it is great they wrote this post and are bringing attention to the problem. I wish someone had told me all of this before I submitted my first app. It helps to know this is an issue you might run into and it is not the end of the process and it does not mean your app won’t get approved.
Rallying devs and their community of users is worthwhile. My advice was more for how to respond and handle the review process internally with google and Apple based on what has actually worked ime ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This only happened because App Stores are a central point of failure (and control and undue taxation).
Tell your legislators that Google and Apple need to open up to web installs. To make them first class, with no hurdles and no scare tactics.
In order to help facilitate this, open up devices to other stores from the moment of device activation - Google Play should be on iPhone, App Store should be on Android, etc. And build proper first-party browser support for "this website has an app, click to install".
If a customer knows about you and wants you, they should be able to grab you from your website. Or another marketplace.
The App Store system as it stands today is perverse and draconian.
> Tell your legislators that Google [...] need to open up to web installs.
You're getting your talking points crossed. Google's Android permits you to install apps from third party sources, and in fact permits the operation of third party appstores. What you mention is a problem with Apple, not Google. This capability isn't just academic, I install most of my apps from F-Droid and use Play Store for only 3 or 4 apps.
And what would you have legislators do in this case? Scold Google for respecting the laws of other countries by choosing not to distribute apps which violate those laws in those countries (but continuing to sell the app in any country in which it isn't banned)? If this guy wants to sell an app in Saudi Arabia, he should make an app that's legal in Saudi Arabia, or distribute it himself if he wants to flaunt those laws. There is no rational, moral or legal obligation for Google to flaunt Saudi Arabian laws on his behalf.
Google is already open to web installs, in the sense that any user who wants to play the game can download the apk and install it on most Android phones without issue.
But that doesn't mean people will actually do so. E.g. if most installs stem from Google promoting the game on the Play Store, using only a website also means losing out on that free publicity. (Or not-free, since Google takes a cut.)
As someone who makes decisions like the one Google made here at work, sorry, dude, but arguing about it publicly isn't going to change much.
Almost certainly Google has received pressure from these countries on this issue and their business there is more important to google than your single app. Google likely isn't being unreasonable - but the governments of these countries are. Sorry.
Historically, it seems like "arguing publicly, getting public outcry, and getting the notice of someone higher up the chain" is pretty much the only way to effectively appeal these sorts of decisions at Google.
I don't know if it'll work in this case, since google's argument ("this contains a slot simulator and some countries don't like that") isn't too egregious, but I can't really fault the dev. When the faceless review process fails, this sort of public appeal has worked before.
> Historically, it seems like "arguing publicly, getting public outcry, and getting the notice of someone higher up the chain" is pretty much the only way to effectively appeal these sorts of decisions at Google.
Not just Google. It seems like a lot of large corporations effectively outsource their customer service to (the platform formerly known as) Twitter and such. Complaining on social media gets results, even after one has been stonewalled by official channels.
And, even if it fails, you can frequently generate a lot of buzz by complaining loudly on social media. How many people reading this do you think had never heard of this game before just now?
I’m about to go through the same thing myself due to my Facebook Marketplace account getting banned for… no idea? Some sort of automated moderation kerfuffle.
No matter how many times I click “request a review of this decision” through their customer service portal, my appeal is automatically denied.
When there’s no way to get customer support from a company, it’s the only other thing left to do.
Probably changing the laws in those countries, which only the citizens of those countries can really do. Google isn't the cause here, just the middleman.
Please remember the context here, we’re talking about a game on the App Store that has a slot machine mechanic.
Many places have similar small variances in obscenity they allow to be published. Your country might forbid nudity on TV, or disallow gambling businesses in public spaces.
I’d say WW2 featured significantly more serious issues.
We're talking about mass censorship of artistic output for which there is widespread international consensus (basically all of the global west) around being both harmless and protected. The app in question very clearly does not allow gambling! The fact that the app depicts a slot machine is a red herring.
Such censorship is being carried out against millions of humans, by one of the few organizations on the planet large enough and resourced enough to take principled stands against same.
Google actually left China for this reason specifically. The correct answer by the same organization in question is not without precedent.
This is not a small transgression on Google's part.
Yeah I’m sorry, even as a person living in the western world, I would not want to live in a world with a defined “morally correct” group of decision makers. Countries vary. Cultures vary. It really is OK.
You can make the argument that big tech is already that, but clearly they respect local laws.
You were comparing this to the Nuremberg trials. That’s mostly where my disagreement lies. Beyond over-exaggerated.
I guess on the other side of the argument: why does a game developer in one country feel obliged to change the content standard set by another country? It’s a pretty minor variance all things considered. Maybe you just can’t “change much” here?
(Also: I don’t agree with the obviously silly content rules.)
The only answer is, likely nothing. There's likely nothing you or anyone else can do to get the governments of those countries to change anything about the way they govern. It's not a tree worth barking up.
Because they enforce when someone complains. They aren't going to proactively ban stuff unless they really have to (e.g. something that is very obviously illegal/scam/etc.)
So if nobody complained about the other apps, they didn't get banned. It is that easy.
That someone else does something that violates those policies/laws too doesn't mean that you get a free pass, unfortunately.
Because running a global service in multiple sovereign jurisdictions makes it impossible to have consistent enforcement. Would you have it so only the laws of the country of the company's HQ matters?
If you mean why isn't Google bringing the banhammer down on every app that fails to meet the criteria isn't that what you want? Allow as much as possible until a government complains?
What is the appeal of this game? (Beyond exploiting addictive personalities with a very thinly-veiled gambling simulator that is rightly being banned.)
It looks so boring. I can't tell if the reviewers proclaiming this as an "innovation" in the "roguelike" (?) genre are trolling or not. It's an ugly slot machine game where you click a buttonn to spin. This would have been uninspired trash in 1993. What am I missing?
As someone with several dozen hours in it, I think of it as the purest distillation of the "deck builder" game genre. In a deck builder, you often shuffle your deck and the order in which you draw the cards influences the stuff you're able to do on each of your turns. This works the same way. You slowly build up a set of symbols which can appear in some random order. The first 20 of them show up on the slot board and their adjacency to other symbols causes various effects to happen. You're trying to make the 20 symbols that appear on each spin be as profitable as possible so you can keep up with the escalating rent payments.
I adore this game and I tell everyone I can about it.
The game is very much a deckbuilder like dominion or slay the spire, and the slot machine is just fluff, except maybe adding a two dimensional aspect to it.
The main appeal is: You accumulate symbols into your deck, and the slotmachine arranges a random selection of your symbols up to 20ish (don't recall 100%) onto a 4x5 grid. Afterwards, symbols interact with symbols, combos happen and it just becomes funny to make a couple hundred thousand gold in a single spin. This is very similar to the fun of having an engine go off in dominion.
And then that appeal changes as you realize that there is very little luck necessary in the game. If you try hard, you can get win streaks at highest ascension levels. If you learn the different combos beyond the obvious ones, the weird interactions you can have with items and essences and so on.
It takes some 3-4 runs to appreciate the depth the game actually has. And then the fun begins.
You're missing the rougelike part. This game is more about deck building and rougelike elements than it is about gambling. The button to spin is indeed the least interesting part of the game.
Items which start unidentified, but can still be used (with some risk of being cursed).
Ability to save and exit at any time to resume later, but no ability to save without exiting. Character death deletes the save file and requires starting from the beginning.
Combat-based gameplay, with monsters becoming more difficult as the player progresses through the map levels.
Character can level up by gaining experience, encouraging them to stay at a given level to gain power.
Food must be consumed to avoid dying of starvation. Food is not particularly common, forcing the player to keep progressing to future levels to avoid starvation.
If it's missing one or more of those elements it's a roguelite at most. It's not just random maps, or "permadeath", or item identification, or the tension between starvation and experience, it's the combination of all those elements.
By your definition "roguelike" feels exteremely narrow, maybe this is why the terms have become so conflated. When I think of rogue-like or lite games (since let's continue to conflate the terms), which are my most played on Steam, I think Spelunky, Risk of Rain, Slay the Spire, Isaac, Noita, FTL, Unrailed!, Spider Heck, maybe even PlateUp!, and of course Luck be a Landlord. It's a popular genre and none fit half your description. Sure they're all roguelite, some only having one or two of your points, but "roguelike" seems useless by your definition. It would only fit Rogue itself and pretty direct clones it seems. I haven't played Rogue....
Read what I said; I didn't say that Rogue had no RNG. I said that roguelike is not meant to mean any game that uses RNG. RNG is common is many kinds of games, we don't call a game a roguelike just because it has RNG. Video poker has RNG. We don't call videopoker a roguelike.
Doom had monsters. We don't say that any game with monsters is a Doom clone. Games are only Doom clones if they have more in common with Doom than merely having monsters.
Roguelikes are dungeon crawlers with random procedurally generated levels, played on a grid with discrete turns and permadeath. The more of these characteristics a game has, the more roguelike it is. There is some flexibility in the meaning of roguelike, room to experiment with the format for instance by using a hex grid instead of square, by loosening the turn-based constraint or even using non-euclidean geometry. But merely having RNG does not make a game roguelike. If having an RNG is what it means to be a roguelike, that makes any game played with dice or a shuffled deck of cards into a roguelike. Is Scrabble a roguelike because you draw random letter tiles and play it on a grid? That's obviously not what roguelike means.
I’ve played the game, its indeed a roguelike deckbuilder. Instead of drawing a hand of cards the same thing is simulated as a slot machine spin. Mechanically the game isn’t much different, aesthetically it is.
There is a significant level of strategy involved and a low level of luck to win.
You pick symbols to add to the wheel that have complex rules for what they reward. To oversimplify, it's slay the spire for people who like the deck-building part but find the battles tedious.
That clone the author mentions in passing is pretty sad. They didn’t even try to change the items or anything about the game to make it their own — literally everything except graphics seems to be lifted directly from the original. Then they went and raised $6m off the back of someone else’s hard work and savvy design.
The game is literally a virtual slot machine. The fact that it doesn't have real money involved doesn't make it legal in all those countries with restrictive gambling laws. And it's bizarre to bring up other games like Jetpack Joyride in your claim when they primarily have non-gambling mechanics and yours doesn't.
The author conveniently forgets to mention that Luck the Landlord game is primarily a slot-machine. Instead, they provide counter examples of games that have slot machine mechanics in them to argue that Play Store policies are applied inconsistently.
It's a slot machine in aesthetics only. A klondike solitaire game is as much of a slot machine as this game - you shuffle the deck and hope that the order of the cards is just right that you're able to complete all of the foundations. You make occasional decisions along the way but it's ultimately just luck of the draw.
I would argue that this game has more agency and skill involved than your average klondike game, actually. Banning shit purely based on the aesthetics is really dumb, particularly when other games get away with having similar aesthetics in their games _including the one that is a direct rip-off of this one!_
Perhaps they are not, but it makes sense for them to keep their Iranian policies up to date so they can enter the country as soon as possible if they are allowed.
North Korea is entirely GEO fenced for all android apps so no policy specifics need to be identified, unlike Iran where free games could be played but could cause a problem if they violate local law or South Korea where Google actually sells android apps.
It seems to be a recurring case with app review processes that Apple and Google only review your app, and won't allow comparisons to be made to other apps.
From a game theory perspective, perhaps this makes sense, as any bargaining power that a successful app might have to come to a special agreement with Apple/Google is diminished if their app isn't in compliance.
Actually, in some cases / places, you absolutely can get away with that defense if you weren't being too far over the speed limit, and can be convincing enough about your assertion that you were simply "keeping up with the normal flow of traffic".
I'm not discouraged when stuff like this happens because I hope it will piss people off enough to trigger a change in the current system, where Apple and Google dictate how people use their mobile computers. This kind of stuff will always happen until the fundamental structure changes.
I'd guess his app was reported by his competitors. If the author wants to make things fair he'll need to report the other apps and have them investigated under the same policies.
This game's primary mechanic is decision making and deck-building. There is no wagering or gambling of money real or otherwise. Only someone grossly misinformed could consider this game gambling, and by their logic would disqualify all games that had any elements of randomness.
I did a double take when I saw this title on the front page of Hacker News. I didn't think it was super well known and I just started playing it again. I hate gambling in games more than anything, and it kills me to see 2K continue to get away with literal slot machines and roulettes, with real money and given an "E" for "Everyone" by a group that is run by a lot of these triple-A board members.
Do they know that you don't even actually put money in the slot machine to spin it? The only money you spend in the game is paid to the titular infernal rent seeker.
> "Apps that simulate gambling, or games of chance or skill that are conducive to gambling are prohibited in the above locales."
This is such a strange decision. I know that this game has no microtransactions, actual gambling or any other forms of monetization, outside of paying to purchase this game. Does this mean that any games where chance plays a major role are off-limits? Or is it the slot machine-like appearance?
What I wonder is, are gacha games still available in these regions? They seem to be a lot more resembling of actual gambling, but few places appeared interested in regulating them.
The fact of the matter is that with $6MM you can hire the talent needed to actually make a game like this palatable to conservative regimes. The reskin of this game hides the offensive elements. It also happens to take the soul out of the game. By turning it from a gambling game to a 'roguelike deckbuilder' you manage to transform it from gambling to playing games, avoiding the censors.
LbaL author, being just one person, would be completely unaware of how games are built and marketed around the world.
>According to Google, the app "contains content that doesn't comply with the Gambling policy."
> It should go without saying that I 100% disagree with this decision. Luck be a Landlord does not violate any gambling policy that Google has in their terms of service.
I don't think its saying it violates google's gambling policy, it violates the gambling policy of those countries