This morning, Apple pulled a number of games that featured the Confederate (or rebel) flag from its App Store.

From what we know, most of if not all of the games affected by this decision from Apple were historical strategy games set during the American Civil War.

The news first got around due to a tweet from development studio Game-Labs regarding its game Ultimate General: Gettysburg. It reads: "Apple has pulled the tablet version of the game from Appstore because of the Confederate Flag."

Finding this out, we then looked around for signs of other games that could be in the firing line of this decision. As it were, a number of HexWar Games's strategy games were missing - those that are set during the American Civil War.

We were able to catch up with HexWar Games's Andrew Mulholland who gave us the full details on what happened here.

This morning, HexWar received a load of notifications saying that some of its games had been suddenly pulled from sale.

There was a note from Apple which read: "We are writing to notify you that your app has been removed from the App Store because it includes images of the confederate flag used in offensive and mean-spirited ways."

The total number of games affected by this is four for HexWar Games. Plus, all of the different versions of them, such as the Lite and Gold versions.

"It seems disappointing that they would remove the games as they weren't being used in an offensive way, being that they were historical war games and hence it was the flag used at the time," Mulholland told us.

At the moment, HexWar Games is working to get the games that have been pulled by Apple back on the App Store. The hope is that changing the flag will be enough.

"We're going to use the Confederate flag from 1861 and 1862. The one that's considered offensive wasn't introduced until late 1862," Mulholland explained.

The flag that HexWar Games will replace the offending flag with is this one:

"Hopefully they'll accept the changes, but it will have to go back through the review process again - so who knows."

If you're unaware, the reason for Apple's sudden distaste for the Confederate flag is due to a renewed debate over its symbolism in America.

So far, Amazon, Etsy , Walmart, eBay, and Sears are ceasing the selling of the Confederate flag. There have been appeals to other companies to make similar actions.

Apple has presumably seen this and decided to remove any imagery of the flag from its App Store where possible. Hence these games have been targeted.

"We're in no way sympathetic to the use of the flag in an offensive way, we used it purely because historically that was the flag that was used at the time," Mulholland said.

For now these strategy games remain unavailable on the App Store. They may reappear soon but will not contain the Confederate flag.