Once upon a time, there was a fantastic series of games. They were well-written, played like a low fantasy version of Oregon Trail with turn-based RPG combat, and contained random events that found a way to remain fresh all the way to the end of the story. This is Tales of Illyria, a trilogy of Android games developed by Little Killerz that has recently been pulled from Google Play. Now pull up a chair and let me tell you the bizarre story about why that happened. I have plenty of Google-being-awful stories of my own, but this one is a doozy even by those standards.

Apparently, Google regularly sends out questionnaires to app developers that heavily focus on their gender and race, which is weird, right? They’re clearly fishing for the next “diverse” dev that they can piggyback off of to look inclusive, which is a whole Pandora’s box of potential politics. Fortunately/depressingly, we can set those all aside since Google has no true beliefs outside of “give us all of the money.”

Tales of Illyria 1: Fallen Knight

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The Tales of Illyria dev I emailed back and forth while allegedly got fed up with Google’s fishing and filled out this survey in a mocking way, listing their gender as “attack helicopter” (side note: I’m aware that some people have come to interpret that meme as transphobic over the years, but I got the impression that it was more to mock Google’s lip service than to be insulting to any actual people). As a result, Tales of Illyria: Beyond the Iron Wall was removed and Google demanded that the cleavage of some characters be removed to have it reinstated. Here’s an image of the maximum cleavage that exists in these games to give you an idea of how baseless that request is. It was also claimed that all of developer Little Killerz’ games were deranked around this same point, becoming harder to find on the storefront and causing a dramatic drop in sales as a result.

That’s admittedly anecdotal, but considering that the original Tales of Illyria came out in 2013 and its removal seems to have occurred sometime in late 2019 to early 2020, there was more than enough time to get a sense of what was normal and abnormal in terms of long-tail sales.

Tales of Illyria 2: Beyond the Iron Wall

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I’m not entirely clear on whether Tales of Illyria: Beyond the Iron Wall was ever reinstated or not, but at this point, the first and third games were still technically available on Google Play. Then another questionnaire showed up and the developer included a link to that interview with Morgan Freeman criticizing the idea of relegating Black History to a single month. The way that clip has been used over the years has imbued it with some baggage, but the underlying point that paying lip service to the idea of diversity becomes its own form of marginalization and “other”ing is highly applicable in this case. Long story short, Google responded at that point by removing all of Little Killerz’ remaining games from their storefront.

In case the absurdity of the situation hasn’t become clear enough yet, Tales of Illyria: Beyond the Iron Wall is a game featuring a fixed female protagonist from a Persian-inspired country, so removing it reduced minority representation on the storefront. And these games weren’t developed by a bunch of dudebro American white guys. I’m not going to delve into that point too deeply because getting hung up on gender and race to weaponize them makes me feel exceedingly gross, but it bears mentioning nonetheless given Google’s supposed priorities here.

The good news is that Little Killerz is trying to get the games relisted. The bad news is that Google is… well, Google. It’s bound to be a process.

Tales of Illyria 3: Destinies

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I’m confident that Google has some “we can do whatever we want for whatever reason” clause hidden away in a developer agreement somewhere, but it’s stunning how much they’re allowed to get away with these days. Is it appropriate for them to wield their storefront (which 20 years ago would be called a monopoly and only avoids that designation now because modern politicians lack a backbone) as a weapon?

Remember: this is a job for app developers. There’s food/rent/child care money at stake, and the size of Google Play means that there’s no well-paying alternative that they can turn to if Google decides to lash out at them for whatever reason. Was Google poked and prodded in this particular instance? Obviously so. Was their response a major escalation after a legitimate criticism about their tokenism? You bet it was. It shouldn’t be acceptable for a company of this size to punish app developers for privately criticizing them, and lest we forget, Google’s reaction to that private criticism was so over the top that the Tales of Illyria games aren’t even available in the libraries of people who paid for them.

Do you have any stories about Google (the Play store in particular) that you want to share on or off the record? Email me at [email protected]