While it seems like the news cycle these days moves so fast it’s hard to keep up with what happened yesterday, let’s roll the clocks back to mid-2015 when one of the primary controversies in the US was removing as many Confederate flags and monuments as possible from public display. For some absolutely unbelievable reason, Apple joined in and removed everything from the App Store that featured a Confederate flag, including but not limited to most, if not all games involving the Civil War. This turned into such a massive story that it not only escaped gaming news circles, but escalated its way up to the mainstream media. This resulted in Apple eventually walking back those policies.
The developer who got burnt the hardest by this seemed to be Slitherine, whose catalog on the App Store consists of incredibly hardcore, and incredibly historically accurate strategy games. To make these games so historically accurate, the battles played out inside of them take place in real world scenarios. These games are very tastefully done, and often serve as fabulous educational experiences as you replay various battles from history and clearly see how miraculous a victory was or how inevitable a defeat may have been.
Well, it would seem that Apple is at it again, removing Slitherine’s Afghanistan 11 ($19.99) from the App Store due to “People from a specific government or other real entity as the enemies." This is a particularly absurd removal because, as mentioned, Slitherine’s catalog focuses on historical accuracy. The enemies in Afghanistan ’11 are the Taliban and other insurgents, but what makes Afghanistan ’11 a truly interesting strategy game is that success is focuses more on not killing people- Instead working towards rebuilding a nation and winning over the hearts and minds of the local population, complete with the eventual withdrawal of forces entirely.
Apple have just pulled Afghanistan ’11 from the app store because its got “people from a specific government or other real entity as the enemies". You mean like every realistic game ever…. and people wonder why we don’t do iOS anymore. https://t.co/LQjUPUkWWr pic.twitter.com/m4YRNQXyoL
— Iain McNeil (@Iain_Slitherine) December 5, 2018
Afghanistan ’11 also features 18 different campaign battles, recreating actual operations that took place in real life, like the raid that ultimately lead to the capture of Bin Laden. Again, like all Slitherine titles, these scenarios are all tastefully executed with an extreme focus on historical accuracy. Unlike many other modern video games where the enemies are just generic brown-skin terrorists, Afghanistan ’11 is firmly planted in reality.
Apple is no stranger to truly baffling moves, and it really sucks that for whatever reason it seems Slitherine has been the target of so many of them. They’re a developer who make very high quality, very expensive, completely premium games- Exactly the sort of studio you’d think they would be happy to have on the platform, instead of taking every opportunity to chase away. Hopefully they walk this decision back like they did the removal of Civil War games, but who even knows why Apple does what it does anymore.
Guess the game doesn’t fit in with Tim Cooks very very PC Apple then... pathetic really.
its very sad that theyre now becoming sjws because of the modern retarded human
Sorry, lost all sympathy for Slitherine when they told everyone who'd bought many of their previous iOS games (at great expense - many of the games were $20, some with another $50+ of add-on campaigns), that updating their games to work on 64-bit would be hard, so their most lucrative course of action was to screw their existing customers, and not update any of those costly games.
Part of their explanation was, "well, it would be too much work to write format converters for old save games and re-test multiplayer between all the platforms" - fine, so give us an update with those capabilities dropped, but that at least just lets the basic game run single-player with no old save games brought over, and only update the subset of games running on the easier engines to fix - give us something for all the money we poured into the games, to show some loyalty to the customers. Nope, they present it as an all-or-nothing scenario in order to justify not doing anything, and screwing their loyal customers.
Think about what you are saying. This is what you are saying:
1. Apple came into my house and destroyed something
2. This other guy won't come in and repair it for me for free
3. That other guy is the bad one
That's called software support. Bewildering, isn't it?
No, it's called "I paid you $20 in 2008, now you are my slave for life if Apple decides to hit my computer with a hammer."
You like making up stuff, don't you? Do you feel like putting words in other people's mouths helps you prevail in discussions? It doesn't. Your list of points is not even remotely what I said.
iOS development has ALWAYS been a moving target, as Apple adds new hardware and software features and changes iOS accordingly. It's part of being an iOS developer to keep up with the changes. If Slitherine didn't know this going in, that's entirely on them.
Yes, this particular change was painful, but enormous numbers of other developers got through it just fine. I have other apps that hadn't seen an update in many years, where the developers came back to update them for iOS 11. And none of those apps cost $20 + $50 worth of add-ons. I, personally, have about $150 worth of Slitherine apps and campaigns that have simply been abandoned by Slitherine.
And Slitherine STILL has a bunch of these high-priced apps on the App Store - apps that won't work with the current iOS or last year's iOS, that won't work on any iOS device made in the last year and a half - and these apps have a message in their description that says, "You will always be able to play this app on iOS 10.3 or older but Apple may remove support for 32 bit apps in future iOS updates." MAY remove support? FUTURE os updates? WTAF? It's extraordinarily disingenuous. It's like they have these sitting there to be painful traps for unsuspecting users, like land mines left over from a war long since over.
Slitherine claimed, "well, some of these were built with other company's engines that are no longer available" - fine, just update the ones that _are_ built on your in-house engine.
They claimed, "it would be tons of work to make them interoperate perfectly with multiplayer on every other platform and to make save-games convert properly" - fine, drop multiplayer and don't convert over old save games, just make single-player work, so we can get _some_ value out of our considerable investment in your apps.
They claimed, "this would cost us weeks of developer time" - fine, disregarding the fact that you should have known the landscape going in, and you made some bad assumptions, put in _some_ effort on this - you could have even put up a GoFundMe to get support for updating a few of the key games and you would have likely received substantial support.
Instead, they presented it as an all-or-nothing, black&white scenario to make it easier to justify them doing absolutely nothing, and painting Apple as the big-bad villain on whom they can blame everything. Instead of doing something, _anything_ to help the customers at least a little (update _some_ games, even if they lose multiplayer and previous save games). Slitherine threw a hissy fit, and pulled a Cartman: "Screw you guys, I'm going home." They had a lot of loyal customers, who have invested a lot of money in Slitherine games and campaigns (making the rash assumption that Slitherine would stand behind their products), and Slitherine decided their best course of action was to not lift a finger, and to try to take all of the anger at _their_ decision to do _nothing_, and redirect it towards Apple.
So, two independent points in response to this article (there's no "but" in between these):
1. Apple shouldn't be pulling this app based on content, as it is presenting historically accurate scenarios (with some "what if" applied).
2. Slitherine will get no sympathy from me for pretty much anything that happens to them now, as they've shown themselves to have zero loyalty towards their customers.
That is what you are saying.
And you think that for your $19.99 paid in 2008, a developer should be forever chained to every time Apple depreciates something important (and they do it every couple years).
Turn your hypocritical eye on Apple, molest not the innocent.
Lost sympathy? This is not about Slitherine, this is about leftist censorship.
I’d be more than slightly surprised if you actually knew what leftist or censorship actually mean, because that’s not what’s happening here. This is what's called free market capitalism. Something that real conservatives champion.
I think you don't know what censorship means. Censorship is exactly what is happening by Apple removing the game.
Apple has no responsibility to host software that violates the terms of their hosting agreement. It's not censorship to not give someone an audience.
What a crock of shit. 'free market capitalism' is the fig leaf for Progressive Fascism being deliberately rubbed in people's faces because 'Net Neutrality' - which was ALSO all about Progressive Fascism - was rescinded.
Yeah, it’s the last sentence of that tweet that grinds my gears.
“And people wonder why we don’t do iOS any more.”
I’m guessing they don’t do iOS any more mostly - if not entirely - because anyone with an interest in historical accuracy will recall that time that most developers totally slammed the surprise 64 bit battlefield Apple sprung upon them, with the surprising exception of Slitherine. Whose core message was “screw everyone who’s paid a tonne for our titles, we can’t be expected not to run up a white flag and OMG DO YOU EVEN KNOW HOW EXPENSIVE IT WOULD BE TO FIX ALL OF THE £20 TITLES PEOPLE BOUGHT?!?!?!”
This is an important story, tbf. Only with the worst kind of “victim” centre stage.
F*** slitherine. I won’t be touching their titles again, on any platform, because of the titles I lost when they decided to run up the white flag.
But, yeah. Their sh**ty attitude also doesn’t mean that apples policy doesn’t suck. (Work the double negatives in that sentence out, strategy fans).
Smartass.
"Their sh**ty attitude also means that Apple's policy sucks." I fixed your grammar, too.
They are upset now when Apple removes their game. But, I didn’t see them doing much about it when Apple previously removed all their 32-bit games.
They were furious, tbf. They explicitly blamed Apple and went on a full on “wtf?” campaign. Slitherine’s own forums were filled with rage @ Apple.
If there’s a distinction to be made between slithering and *most* other devs, it’s (IMO) that slitherine charge(d) £20 per app, had a rayt niche audience, and were still up for binning the lot of us.
Oh, and then put a tonne of their 32 bit apps on sale (more than once?) fully aware that they had a shelf life of days / weeks / (optimistically) months.
The game is still American propaganda. I mean America did INVADE a country, yet this game makes those who were defending their country to be the "bad" guys. If it was neutral and you could decide to choose which side you wanted to play as, then that would be a better approach. But yeah.... not falling for it sorry... Not to mention the war was a complete disaster for America, and the Taliban is strong as ever, so the game isn't even very accurate.
Ironically, Afghanistan ‘11 is a successor to their game Vietnam ‘65.
Bullseye. "Winning hearts and minds" through the reinstitution of the heroin trade....
lol
The game is historical. Removing it was propaganda. You can support the politics behind the censorship, but it's still politically motivated censorship.
There was a time when the resident of the Presidential Palace and the members of the Parliament were all Taliban. They are not now (although some may be sympathetic, like Democrats with the KKK in the latter part of the 19th Century). It is simply not a fact that "the Taliban is as strong as ever." It's not. The Taliban cannot govern, or even operate openly, except in a few isolated places. Are they strong in some places where they have a lot of sympathizers? Sure, again, just like the Democrats ran the South for 100 years after the Civil War and the KKK was able to operate as a domestic terror network with a degree of protection. Can they muster up a deranged wingnut (who in the US would be a school shooter) to blow himself up for 72 virgins and a payoff to his family? From time to time, yes. But before 2003 they were a lot worse on the Afghan people than they are now.
It does not help that Pakistan plays a double game of supporting the Taliban on both its own soil and in Afghanistan, while simultaneously opposing them. However, that has more to do with the civil war within Pakistan's own government (talk about a deep state!) than it does to do with Afghanistan.
the game looks awesome, very educational.
I'm thinking Apple will eventually remove Rebel Inc. as well.
My deepest sympathies, developing is such hard work to end up being hurt by a political decision is gut wrenching. I can only hope the 'PC' Apple police get real and stop the snowflake attitude to the real world. If someone doesn't like this game don't buy it, its that simple. It is not only fascists that try to rewrite history.
Apple make me puke with their self-righteous, prudish, and ultimately incredibly shortsighted attitudes. Seems like their leadership lacks a lot of intellectual capacity when it comes to politics and basically anything outside hardware manufacturing. They are so far UP THEMSELVES it is beyond belief.
this is very sad that apple has done this theyre afraid because it has a dumbass confederate flag
Hmmm a lot of comments that have a "but..."
"Oh its bad that apple is pulling a politically correct move...but the developer in question deserves it"
Interestingly, for people who have A'11 still installed on their mobile device, Slitherine still tries to charge full price for the Royal Marines DLC of a dead game... But on the other hand, this "bamboozle you customer" behavior is nothing new...
If only a US company pulling an Afghanistan game was as easy as the US pulling out of Afghanistan.
All join in as we witness the demise of Apple Computer™. Won’t happen over night but here it comes.
Apple endorses the taliban
Apple has become too PC. haha. Time to ditch Apple and Tim Cook's ridiculousness.
If they're really focused on historical accuracy, why does the trailer include objectives that haven't actually happened in the real world like "winning the hearts and minds of locals" and "building a modern democratic nation"? That sounds more like wishful thinking than what has actually taken place in Afghanistan since the U.S. invasion and occupation.
Why does the left destroy anything that is fun? Socialists already killed a hundred million people, isn't that enough?
It's time to stop using Apple items.
Apple is so globalist that they are anti-American.
Only Nazi's are allowed to be villains.
And republican's are considered Nazi's.
Unless it's Halo then the flood are republican's.
Screw Apple it's their loss like the Taliban's.
I don't use it for games or much else unless I have too.
How about, blow me Apple.
Slitherine makes fantastic, realistic games based on real world situations and tangible strategies. You don't like that the Taliban are our enemy and OPFOR? Jump in your freaking time machine and go try to convince them to do otherwise. I'll be right here in reality waiting for you.
If your main purpose for existence is to be an Apple Fanboi, maybe we should do a grid search and send out a SAR Team for your pathetic, lost life.
The issue here is plain and simple. Apple continues to demonstrate their primary interest is censorship and control. There are a whole lot of us who value personal freedom much more than we do clinging to their products that suck more by the day.
Er - the *capture* of Bin Laden??
Did I miss something?
Or is someone about to be "disappeared" for exposing some VERY classified info?
Perhaps if the developers made China the heroes...