Water Cooler Games - iTunes App Store can reject you for any reason

iTunes App Store can reject you for any reason
May 7, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Following my occasional series of gripes about Apple openness (1, 2, 3, 4), I thought I'd share a part of the agreement iPhone application developers must accept in order to be able to publish to the forthcoming iTunes App Store:

6.2 Selection by Apple for Distribution
You understand and agree that Apple may, in its sole discretion:
(a) determine that Your Application does not meet all or any part of the Documentation or Program Requirements then in effect;
(b) reject Your Application for distribution for any reason, even if Your Application meets the Documentation and Program Requirements; or
(c) select and digitally sign Your Application for distribution via the iTunes Store.

There's reason for some kind of discretionary policy, but it's worth noting that para 6.2(b) allows so-called "soft censorship" as well. It's hard to say how or if it will be exercised.

Incidentally, the same is apparently true for the XBox Community Arcade (or whatever it will be called). I haven't seen the agreement for it, but at the Academic Days on Game Development conference Dean O'Donnell asked a Microsoft rep if they would pull down a game like, say, "George Bush: War Criminal." The answer? "Basically, yes."

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Comment from Casey O'Donnell on May 8, 2008

I've been following this closely, the iPhone SDK and its relationship with XNA/Live Arcade and WiiWare. It's a complicated issue.

The most recent release of the iPhone SDK now supports OpenGL ES, so you can finally start making and testing those games even without Apple's approval. It's the step of getting the game onto the iPhone that requires licensing. Distribution is then tied to that licensing key.

It looks like Apple's route is somewhere in-between XNA and WiiWare, with XNA only slightly less restrictive and WiiWare significantly more restrictive.

An interesting similarity is that XNA and the iPhone SDK require that you use languages relatively specific to those platforms (though Cocoa will get you onto OS X as well, but C# will get you onto Windows too). XNA lets you run your game on the Xbox without anything special, which is where it is less restrictive than the iPhone SDK. The nice thing about the iPhone SDK is that if you have a license, you can remote debug on the iPhone. To do that on the Xbox you'll need a full fledged DevKit.

WiiWare of course is at the other end of the spectrum. You must get a DevKit even before you can get started. At least with XNA and the iPhone you can start development and not need to port it to the hardware after receiving license to distribute.

In all three cases, you are stuck though. If your game/software is controversial, then likely you'll be booted from the system without much possibility for recourse or alternative distribution.

Though, it does make me wonder about the possibility of apps that become sub-platforms. So rather than writing a single game for the iPhone, you write an application with some virtual machine or engine that reads games from another remote site. From what I can tell, this would not violate license agreements.

Also interesting is that for a game to get distributed on LiveArcade or WiiWare requires ESRB rating, I don't believe that the iPhone App Store is going to enforce that. The same is true with the Community Arcade (or whatever).

I'm slightly concerned about the "peer review" aspect of the XNA Community Arcade, and what defines one's peers in the realm of game design, and what kinds of folks will volunteer to review. Sometimes peer review can result in fairly mediocre outcomes or the suppression of ideas that push the envelope.

All in all, it seems an experiment largely in the same sort of business practices. Open up a bit, but by all means control distribution.

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