Apple is targeting 5000 - not 5, not 50, not 500: five fucking thousand - applications for removal from the iPhone's App Store due to "overtly sexual content". This is the developer equivalent of a pogrom set in the town from Footloose. The obvious, knee-jerk response you might be expecting from me is "censorship sucks my @#$%!" as I chimed back in the day, when I was developing for consoles, looked at Braid as my commercial/artistic model of success, and was losing money trading. Now I have a somewhat more nuanced perspective.
You're a developer, you love games, you love figuring out the best way to splice a data-structure in real-time, but you're also an economic entity, so any app/game you develop is in a way a bet, best a calculated bet, on some kind of continued or shifting behavior in the entertainment marketplace. Let's say you want to bet that people will continue to be undisciminating horndogs, not an unreasonable one, and you have a variety of instruments to choose from in placing this bet. These instruments break down to the sorts of mechanics you design into the delivery of your data which, on visual parsing, resembles boods or whatever. Now imagine you're taking this risk on and spilling yourself on the vargaries of market chaos, hoping for Win, playing the game-game, and all of the sudden the platform holder politely informs you that your bet is being canceled regardless of performance, and they aren't even going to reimburse you for the dev costs.
If I were the adventuresome, venturing sort, which I am, this kind of precedent makes me think that said platform has no credibility as a marketplace. Sure, Apple has credible reasons for defending their cut of the pie, they want their platform to seem more credible to consumers, and that's fine. But what splits my hairs on this one isn't so much the censorship of the data as the fiat discrimination between instruments.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to make a reference to finance to nail this one home. Prepare yourselves.
Designing a game or some other product around a tactic of draping it in sex is sort of like short-selling, where you bet that things will get worse. You're assuming, hey, eventually people will get more horny than they are interested in new stuff. Similar psychology. What Apple is doing here may seem like the Government banning short-selling altogether, but in fact it's more capricious and inconsistent, and is similar to some bullshit that brokers have pulled in 2009. See, if you want to bet on a market decline, you have a lot of instruments to do that, you can borrow shares of individual stocks and sell them, you can buy Put options, you can buy ETFs that short the market for you, and you can buy ETFs that short the market for you with leverage. Some brokers decided those leveraged instruments were too risky for their genteel, retiree customers, and unilaterally banned them from their services. Very similar motivation, similar scope (Apple is more like a broker than the entire market, albiet exclusively for one segment of the market) and similar ball busting, smug attitude that belies a lack of true customer service, which I believe supports broad choice in the customer.
The platforms that are truly going to win are not going to moralize pre-emptively on your behalf, they aren't going to have high barriers to entry, they aren't going to siphon off more than 40% of the revenues (20-30% is a range where mathematically the balance of power encourages growth an innovation rather than near-term enrichment of the platform operator) and most of all they are going to let the market sort itself out. So while I'm ruling the AppStore out of my candidate list of potential winners, let's backtrack and go ahead and scratch XBLA, WiiWare (lot check is way too inefficient, distribution sucks), and any kind of closed web-portal, such as, hey, Big Fish for example.
Most likely platforms themselves will be de-emphasized as things get more Cloud-y, but as for now I'd say Facebook et al. have profound edge.
Facebook games
Of course, currently Facebook prohibits nudity and adult or sexual content (see Policies section IV-A).
Wrong side of the stick
How about evaluating the situation from two important point of views glaringly absent from the original post -- common sense, and the distribution channel controller's interest:
So the best thing a couple of thousand devs could come up with was FIVE freaking THOUSAND apps of schoolgirl feel up, panty peeking and clit twirling olympia. And this on the platform of a company ill-famous about its tight content control, maybe in hopes of staying undiscovered in the jungle of 160'000+ apps.
-They were asking for it, really, and should be happy with whatever money their apps made so far. And that in fact might be quite good profits -- let's not deny there is a market for all forms of pornography.
Those of them who want their apps to stay in the App Store shall dev something more fitting with Apple's policy next time, and those who feel real rebels are welcome to flock to Android with thousands of Fisting Lube Brawl games and such, and see if Google is going to be happy about it.
And how about the distribution channel controller's PoV:
Apple was obviously not happy to find those FIVE THOUSAND apps ranging from milder, skin-flashing photo slideshow downloaders to explicit and pornographic sex sims. If they want to stay a trusted source of content, and one important aspect of that is to be held by the public as "family friendly", they only got a few options available to deal with the situation:
- They can simply kill all non-"family friendly" content, and done, Mission Accomplished. They got a couple of thousand disgruntled devs as the result (who, to begin with, should have been smarter than trying to pull this off with Apple).
- Or they could add a Mature section to the App Store, and introduce a bunch of filtering mechanisms, pulling privacy-sensitive info from all of their customers, like Age, country of residence vs. regulation of the given country on sexual content... the list goes on. For such apps to stay, adding a Mature section would be mandatory, and regardless of all the trouble and effort a large part of the customer base would show concern about Mature content at Apple.
Just a hint of common sense, and these devs should have realized it will be coming, and some of them had obviously seen it coming but tried to make a profit in the meantime. And if you think I am defending Apple, you miss the point.
the99th: I'm with you,
the99th: I'm with you, brother, although your implication that the iPhone app store takes 40% of revenues is wrong (it's actually 30%, and the evidence so far has been that it's supported a ton of innovation by small developers.)
IBelanszky: You're bashing a straw-man. I don't know whether there were any hardcore apps, but I tend to doubt it: that's always been explicitly banned from day 1, so I don't think anything like that would ever get by Apple's notoriously picky reviewers. All the banned apps I've heard of have been basically soft-R-rated T&A stuff, like wet-t-shirt pinup photos or the game "Daisy Mae's Alien Barbeque" where your cartoon avatar runs around in tight shorts.
The part of this that infuriates me the most is that Apple didn't ban equally jiggly apps by Playboy or Sports Illustrated, and Apple's Phil Schiller quite literally said (in today's NYT) that it's because those come from big publishers. In the same article he even used the dreaded words "think of the children". That's a level of cynical demagoguery that really shocked me. My most charitable (yet unlikely) guess is that Schiller's prepping for a run for Republican office in the near future and wants to burnish his family values.
This Is My Main Point
"The part of this that infuriates me the most is that Apple didn't ban equally jiggly apps by Playboy or Sports Illustrated, and Apple's Phil Schiller quite literally said (in today's NYT) that it's because those come from big publishers."
Yeah, my thing here is the inconsistency. It's like if the broker told you that you could sell-short and buy puts to bet on the baser tendencies (of things to go down, adapt that phrase as a sexual metaphor if you like) but you can't use the leveraged ETFs (the easiest to use and the ones most commonly available, such as to IRA accounts) and THEN that same broker was filling orders for big Hedge Funds on that same stuff. In the short-term "it's just business" but in the long-term it's the impetus for a migration. Two-tiered markets and closed markets can't show sustainable growth, that's my point.
Facebook isn't perfect either, I think their platform advantages are going to be eroded and things could become even more wild west, we'll keep an eye on the trend of social games having their owns sites and using multiple platforms for distribution. What I like about this is that the tables have much more leverage to turn, instead of portals having all the power, the real big money and big audiences are where the platforms are being used. Of course, instead you have Zynga... :P
Not this again
Every thread in every forum/blog/etc I have seen about this has an IBelanszky pretending that these apps were seriously sexually loaded instead of bikini/underwear pictures. The apps DID NOT violate any agreement with Apple, they were processed and approved like any other app. Apple retroactively changed their requirement for what could be available, and they did so with extreme bias (they have allowed the Playboy app to remain up). It's their playground, but that's an ethically questionable way to do business.
Seriously, "explicit and pornographic sex sims" were not ever approved in the app store. All of the apps in question contained no nudity you can't find in the lingeries section of the sears catalog.
Drop the explicit porn part
Okay Joe, let's drop it, but consider something like the following app -- can you honestly wonder why such stuff gets scrubbed from the App Store (unless backed by Playboy Mag)?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8U6ik6ryQo
As a sidenote, the japanese male demographic made a nice wad of money for this iPhone dev. Here is his Ignite talk on the subject:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FtWWTllCrg
Ugh.
Haha, I can't be offended by the content of that, but it IS lame as hell. You made my day.
EDIT: Don't misunderstand me: I don't think these are quality apps or anything important, but just because I don't care about something doesn't mean I agree on their way of doing business. They should have just made an adult section of their app store. It's their ship to run in the end, but they seem to treat developers shabbily and this is just a drop in the bucket.