Luck Be a Landlord Might Be Banned from Google Play

LBAL and Balatro being banned or 18+ age-gated for having gambling "vibes" despite not actually simulating gambling, while the stores are full of gacha games which are designed to bleed players dry through real-money gambling mechanics is a ridiculous state of affairs. The latter makes Google and Apple insane amounts of money though so of course they're not going to do anything about them unless their hand is forced.

There is a clone of Luck Be a Landlord named Random Card created by a South Korean developer that included microtransactions and gacha elements and Google gave that game an award.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;android-developers.googleblog.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;07&#x2F;google-play-indie-games-festival-finalists-revealed.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;android-developers.googleblog.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;07&#x2F;google-pla...</a><p>So in Google&#x27;s eyes, actual gambling is fine but simulated gambling is not even though both of them look like the exact same type of gambling. The only difference between the two is that in one situation Google gets a larger kickback.

Maintaining a “finished” game or app on google play has never worked well for me. There is constant nag to update it for a variety of reasons. Even if the nag comes from device related sdk updates (just recompiles), a reupload requires you to comply with latest policies that often seem very subjective.

I&#x27;ve completely let both my Google Play and App store accounts expire.<p>Google Play now wants a lot of personal information to upload stuff, and demands constant updates.<p>For what?<p>3 people to download it ?<p>All hands are going to be open source from here on out. If I feel like it I might set up a GitHub pipeline to build an APK, but I&#x27;m not playing this game with Google anymore.<p>Apple is even worse because they can reject your app from random reasons, and charge you $100 a year even if you&#x27;re not publishing new stuff.

To be fair, if you were to design a game meant to create false positives for gambling, it would probably be a game just like this.<p>While a sympathize with the dev, this is a bit like carrying around a replica gun in public and complaining that you constantly have to ward off police reports.<p>Parents are gonna see the slots and file reports.

pet peeve: the notice from google says &quot;including simulated gambling&quot; so to rephrase that as &quot;they say it&#x27;s gambling&quot; is annoying

This post would benefit from a screenshot. Here’s one I found: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shared.fastly.steamstatic.com&#x2F;store_item_assets&#x2F;steam&#x2F;apps&#x2F;1404850&#x2F;ss_6419b6d713a5cb51c3b3eae5db669459059ff142.1920x1080.jpg?t=1733060571" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shared.fastly.steamstatic.com&#x2F;store_item_assets&#x2F;stea...</a>

To the folks mentioning every game under the sun with a random element and calling it &quot;gambling&quot;, that&#x27;s wrong.<p>Gambling involves random events, of course, but not just random schedule. The <i>payout</i> being random is what makes gambling gambling. People don&#x27;t spend hours at the slot machine because every once in a while they get a giant jackpot. They spend hours because relatively frequently they get <i>some</i> payout, but any given payout may be small or large. Same with the lottery: people don&#x27;t keep playing it because of that 1 chance in a few hundred million of getting the (as of this writing) $95 Million (Mega Millions) or $285 Million (Powerball) . People play the lottery every week looking for that $2 or $5 payout, or on good weeks a $20 or $50.

Related, I&#x27;ve noticed a lot of streaming services have began reclassifying the ratings of older movies and shows. So someone that was G or PG when released might be, like, 14+ on Amazon.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s part of an effort to add consistency to old ratings (which were famously inconsistent). But more often it&#x27;s that the ratings are being &quot;adjusted&quot; for modern sensibilities - depictions of smoking, drinking, bigotry, etc.<p>I have no idea where this new prudish attitude towards gambling is coming from, but it seems to be part of a larger cultural &quot;vibes&quot; shift.

Apple and Google&#x27;s app store policies have destroyed billions in potential market capitalization of both large and small companies alike, and have measurably negatively impacted the national security of the west by destroying the resilient peer-to-peer software delivery supply chain common to systems like MacOS and Windows, replacing it with a centralized, easily exploited gatekeeper.

This is the game, since it wasn&#x27;t linked to from the post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.trampolinetales.lbal">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.trampoline...</a>

Fighting against the plight that is the unbridled gambling put in front of large swathes of people with no grasp on math is treated as innocence. It will cost us so much as a society, so, so much more that the small short term profits it brings. For shame.

Interesting that our intellivsion game console in the early 80s came with the &quot;Los Vega Poker and Blackjack&quot; as the pack in cartridge.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mobygames.com&#x2F;game&#x2F;10587&#x2F;las-vegas-poker-blackjack&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mobygames.com&#x2F;game&#x2F;10587&#x2F;las-vegas-poker-blackja...</a><p>The cover art made gambling look like fun. Thought the game was not really bad, it wasn&#x27;t much fun. A odd choice for a a kids game company. Though sponsored games weren&#x27;t around but would come soon enough (Kool-aid man, heman ,main etc...)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;history.blueskyrangers.com&#x2F;mattelelectronics&#x2F;games&#x2F;koolaid.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;history.blueskyrangers.com&#x2F;mattelelectronics&#x2F;games&#x2F;k...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;history.blueskyrangers.com&#x2F;mattelelectronics&#x2F;games&#x2F;masters.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;history.blueskyrangers.com&#x2F;mattelelectronics&#x2F;games&#x2F;m...</a><p>Almost all AAA games now come with a gambling minigame &quot;Qwent&quot;, &quot;Sabac&quot;. Often they get released on their own.<p>Though I&#x27;ll concede its a little different now that are smart phones are connected to our wallets.

The app is 17+ on iOS as well, I assume for the same reason.

How have we ended up with the worst of the public and private markets with app stores?

Dancing at the edge of a volcano has risks, and the person who falls in may feel that someone else deserves it more. And onlookers may agree that the dancer doing triple backflips shouldn’t survive if someone doing the Macarena flops into the cauldron. Lots of reasons to say “whatabout”?<p>But they are all dancing up there.

I think it&#x27;s fair enough to ban apps that resemble the aesthetics of gambling