Rejected App - now what?

Target Platforms Mobile
1

UPDATE 07/13/09 - After the first version was rejected, I submitted a new version. The second version has also been rejected. I added the details to the end of this thread.

After 26 days in review I received an email that my latest app, Ragdoll Killa!, was rejected under section 3.3.12, the catch-all response for apps with “content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

:?

The app itself is similar to other ragdoll apps currently in the store, closest in tone to Mr. Smith, another Unity app. There is blood, and you basically toss this cartoon (YES CARTOON!) guy around, using different weapons to blow him up. Everyone who tried the app before submission enjoyed it and all of them laughed out loud - which was my goal from the start.

Before you say - “You were asking for it,” yes I do think the concept is a little twisted, but I wouldn’t have spent a month+ working on it if I actually thought that it was outside of the app store guidelines. There are countless apps that are more violent than mine, and at least I tried to do it in a comical, non-serious, way. My thought was, if Payback, Car Jack City, Brothers in Arms and, yes, Mr Smith are within the bounds, this is OK.

Anyway, now I’m trying to decide what to do with the app, and looking for any advice.

My options are:

  1. Release it on Cydia, ad-supported, for free to jailbroken users. This brings up a few questions - Is this allowed with the Unity TOS and is this future App Store suicide as an official dev?

  2. Remove all blood and violence, destroying the essence of the app.

  3. Rip out the violence and use the existing app as a platform for a totally new game, basically starting from scratch.

  4. Others?

I thought that the 3.0 ratings system was supposed to address this issue. I guess not.

Any ideas are great. Still trying to process this without feeling bitter…

:roll:

2

Speaking as someone that has also had an app rejected, my suggestion is to move on and don’t waste your time feeling bitter. The App Store is a new, unknown beast. You would just waste time diddling with the app to try to get it accepted while you could be doing something more constructive.

Don’t get me wrong. I probably would have bought the app. :slight_smile: It looks fun.

You can see (blurry) video of my offensive app here…

3

I read about your app on the TA forums but I didn’t catch the user name or realize that that was you. Thanks for the input.

Moving on is easier said than done though, and it’s incredibly depressing to have a month down the drain (with no income) because my app ended up in the wrong reviewer’s hands (sure, sure, learning experience and all that…)

I’m on the verge of submitting a simpler, non-offensive, free app, that was intended to drive traffic to this paid app. So now I need to rethink my whole strategy, and it has me questioning exactly what I can or can’t do in future apps, and how much time I can afford to invest in each app, knowing it may be lost time.

I think I need to just hit the treadmill, have a beer and blow off some steam. Or else this post is going to go on forever…

4

Reduce the amount of “pure violence” and reattempt an approval and/or contact them directly on why it was explicitely rejected.

Cydia is a good way to never again release an application with apple iTunes store

5

I think that your game cross the line between fun and cruelty.

I understand why it has been rejected and approve it.

I know that there are a lot of questionable games like GTA for example, but in your game what you are doing is basically torture someone.

It is not fun at all.

But you may keep the gameplay that seems to be fun and remove the cruelty so you have a nice game and haven’t lost your time doing it.

Also in some country these kind of games would not be authorized (when you explain how to kill people in a fun way, remember that there are a lot of crazy people out there that could think it is a good idea and do it for real)

6

@Dreamora - thanks for the tip, I kind of thought that too regarding Cydia.

@Nikko - I respect your opinion, but I also strongly disagree with the theory that violent games create violent people. It has actually been shown that children who play a certain amount of violent games are less violent in real life than kids who play none.

Also, I honestly feel that if someone is going to learn how to kill another human from dropping a cartoon anvil on a cartoon ragdoll, that person was most certainly going to kill someone anyway. Or they already learned it from Looney Tunes.

I’m a fan of all types of video games. My first iPhone game was non-violent, and my next is non-violent as well. Ragdoll Killa is meant, above all else, to be humorous. Humor is a VERY subjective thing, and it is impossible to make something funny and please everyone. I realize I’m starting to sound defensive here, but there is such a thing as harmless fun, and I think balancing this in a humorous way is an art form in itself.

I would be more than happy to let Apple rate this as 17+, but that isn’t an option.

As a developers and business owners, we all make decisions on where to put our energies. In this case, I looked at the sales of my first app (none), looked at what my nephews were buying, looked at what was selling, looked around to see what Apple considers acceptable standards, and created something that I feel is uniquely mine, while still fitting into a defined genre.

It is certainly possible to remove all the blood and violence from the app, and I may have to do that. Though I do seriously wonder if the intended audience would even be interested in it at that point.

7

You could turn the cartoon human into a cartoon alien and change the blood’s color to green. That worked for Zombie Mangle, which became “Alien Mangle” instead.

I say this with 85% seriousness.

8

Change the man with an octopus?

There are some reasons why it would be accepted to see some fish burning alive on a barbecue at TV prime time, but not some babies… that killing bugs with a spray can be funny but not Jewish with yellow crosses on their shoulders…you may hang a chicken at the branch of a tree but not a black man…

I think that as soon as your game may seriously hurt and shock some people, then it is better to avoid doing it. I know it is hard to see where the line stand…

When you develop on iPhone you are live on prime time, millions of people will see your game.

You will certainly find a way to change the game and get it accepted. It looks like a lot of work has been put in this game so I would not give up and just fix what they don’t like and send it again.

9

My girlfriend would say replace the blood with flowers … (there is a top down iso like shooter for the desktop that has multiplayer mode and its the only one my gf plays, mainly because it has a flower instead of blood mode. She does not like red nor green blood or blood alike fluids)

10

My girlfriend would say replace the blood with flowers … (there is a top down iso like shooter for the desktop that has multiplayer mode and its the only one my gf plays, mainly because it has a flower instead of blood mode. She does not like red nor green blood or blood alike fluids)

Also you can try to make it more toony.
From what I see on the screens it looks like toonish graphics with “real world behaviour”.
How about instead going with toonish behaviour too (“oouuchii” emote bubbles and alike, toony slapstic humor)

11

These are all great ideas! Thanks everyone for the input. It sounds like a lot of the problem is WHAT or WHO is getting killed here, and I understand that.

I’m definitely open to the idea of making him less human, more alien-like, changing the blood to green and even a “flower-mode” could work really well. It opens the concept to invasion-style gameplay, something I hadn’t considered before.

Perhaps a better game will emerge from this?

:o

12

Sorry to hear. It looks really really fun. A pitty. Maybe it gets accepted at a later point in the store once one app broke a new barrier.

13

It’s not lost work.

As others said, just remove the blood, and it will be submittable :wink:

14

But id’s DOOM Resurrection has been approved yesterday.
A game with a lot of blood real zombies.

15

I wish I could say the apple were consistant :slight_smile: Second time around, you might get lucky. :smile:

16

Thanks again everyone. After all of the comments and a lot of thought on what the app actually does, I’m positive it’s less of what is happening in the app and more of who it’s happening to. (Poor little innocent ragdoll!)

I can totally see how a single reviewer could look at an entertainment app that lets you torture someone and not approve it. Maybe that reviewer had a friend who was impaled on giant spikes or blown up with TNT. Maybe it was the choice of red, white and blue for the his costume, and the reviewer thought it was anti-American. Who knows. (Conspiracy theories!) :shock:

But that’s the problem, (supposedly) it’s a single reviewer making the call. Whether any app is tasteless or obscene is debatable, but whether it’s so tasteless it can’t be sold at all is completely subjective. Why not rate it 17+?

I wasn’t at WWDC, but I did read about a popular T-Shirt worn at the event that said “F*** Section 3.3.12.” Now I get it.

I’ve received a lot of great advice, and I’m going to use that to make changes and re-submit.

17

Try just removing the blood. Look at Pocket God. You kill 100s of little pigmy guys!

18

Maybe, have the ragdoll cry out for help. Have it plead for mercy a little too.

Honestly, your app strikes a bad chord in me. For instance, it would sort of worry me if my 12 year old son had a lot of fun “playing” it.

But, I bet if you give the players a choice of ragdoll (more aliens and non-human characters) and either removed the blood or changed it to green (or maybe a user definable color), it would pass Apple’s review. … another thought is to simply rename it and resubmit it again unchanged… maybe next time the reviewer would pass it? It seems a little hit miss sometimes.

19

That’s fair, I can respect that.

I’m definitely going to make him an alien, and change the blood to green, then see where it goes from there. Dreamora’s flower-blood idea is brilliant. New title, too. Having “Killa” in the title might be a bit much, but then again, they didn’t say anything about the title.

Strangely, and this may not improve your opinion of the app, your sick tags aren’t far off. :sweat_smile: The Soundtrack Pro library includes a lot of good Whats?, Whys? and yells.

I should post a video.

20

Hi cheezorg,

I’ve done a lot of research on this type of thing, from character profiles for novel writing, to movie/tv, and ESRB and other game rating systems. Apple is broad media / general public (read risk adverse) in their ratings. Assume lowest common denominator (on the risk charts) based on their largest markets (since most concepts of “offensive” are only applicable within a cultural context).

So with Apple, expect mostly American mainstream tolerances/inclinations (like in the case of nudity). There are some generally accepted “catch alls” that apply to anyone (big company or indie) that spell death to any project, like the unofficial rule that no video game will ever depict (or allow the user to) kill a child (yes some movies and games have shaved the line and … implied (screams off camera, etc). but no game crosses the line and expects to get mainstream published.

A similar concept exists for female “bad guys” which extends back to writing, which roughly states that a female bad guy will always generate a sympathetic response, so be cautious how you handle a character like that (the concept being that something fundamentally wrong happened for a female to be in this evil state, the same is not applied to males).

Your game, as has been noted, inflicts graphic damage/violence (realistic blood = graphic) on a character that neither provokes the attack, nor responds to it (other than to get punished) which means 1) the violence is classified as “senseless” and 2) any character in that place is likely to be trigger a sympathetic response from anyone not “in on the gag” intended.

If your character “taunts” the user, or responds in turn with some action, then many of the issues clear up. Now, again as with anything, this is subjective. My current game implies that the user has been initially provoked, then the user shoots the “bad guys” endlessly. Now… the game “taunts” and cheers the user as the game goes on.

Will my game get rejected based on content, even though in fact I am allowing the player to endlessly destroy the bad guys without any probable cause, and the bad guys never seem to react to this … no, for a couple of reasons, 1) the attacks are not “graphic”, and 2) the bad guys are not “human” (you don’t even shoot a humaniod figure, the bad guys are entirely implied). Now there may be other reasons to reject the game (Like it doesn’t properly respond to No internet when trying to access online high scores, but content wise, I think I’ve followed the subjective “rules”.

I hope this helps,

Galen