Google may ban Luck from being the owner of its own app store

There are all kinds of fun ways to celebrate the New Year. Get an email about how crazy he is Google Maybe not among them.

But whether it was needed or not, that’s exactly what the Luck be a Landlord developer got. This wasn’t the first time they had to deal with Google this way.

Luck be a Landlord is a game about gambling – or at least, that’s the case if you spend less than a second looking at it. After that moment, you realize that the connection to gambling is profound.

In the game, you can use a magical slot machine to build wealth and pay off your landlord’s exorbitant rental rates. You always win when you play a slot machine, but to get the jackpots you need, you can change the symbols you spin around to create combos and synergies – all the traditional roguelike stuff.

In other words, you never gamble with anything. It’s as much of a gamble as it is in Slay the Spire or other similar games. It just uses gambling images as a framing device, to make the random rows and columns easier to understand intuitively.

It’s an elegant system, and one that Google doesn’t like. Unless the game is given a much higher age rating than its actual contents suggest, Google intends to remove it from its app store.

This isn’t the first time Google has spooked the game’s developer, TrampolineTales. But in the recent period, things have been relatively stable. The developer was surprised by the email received on New Year’s Day, and said as much in his message Blog post about this topic.

Nothing has changed with Luck be a Landlord in the past few months, but for whatever reason, my game is “gambling” now!

This is largely due to fatigue, where the developer’s current plan is to shrug their shoulders and take the hit in stride. Google has decided that Luck be a Landlord is a gamble, and demands an increase in its age rating, and the developer intends to comply.

I do believe that Luck be a Landlord deserves the equivalent of an E10+ rating in all areas, but at this point I’ve just given up and will take issue with any inaccurate rating being imposed on the game.

Luck punishes the landlord for gambling images, but the gambling mechanics are still good, it seems

A common question on everyone’s lips here is “Why does enforcement around video game gambling seem to be so selective?” This isn’t the owner’s first rodeo, but the actual gambling mechanics in things like loot boxes remain part of the gaming landscape.

We’re approaching the 10th anniversary of the loot box speech (see MonitoringRelease date if you want to feel old ) and while Public sentiment They seem to have found a definitive answer to the “they’re bad” question, and that sentiment has yet to take root in the boardrooms where terms of service policies are being finalized.

One can hope that popular sentiment will, eventually, reach the places it is needed – be it in business meetings or… Government policies – But we still have a long way to go.