Now here’s a strange bit of news. It appears some of the games on Apple’s iTunes app store are being hit with the censorship hammer. How hard? More like inconsistent love taps to certain developers. The story has been circulating around a few outlets, with GamesIndustry.biz having a decent compilation of what’s going on.

Matthew Handrahan from the GI.biz article writes…

“The screenshots for Tempo, a new iOS shooter from Splash Damage, feature either pixelated guns or display clear signs that guns were removed after the fact.” … “Another recent example is the confusion over Orangepixel’s Gunslugs 2, which was released to the App Store without complaint on January 16, only to have an update rejected two weeks later, based on a single screenshot.”

The above main image to this article looks silly because the guns from Splash Damage’s recent title were blurred out for the iTunes page. The main character looks like he’s trying to stuff his junk back into his pants that happened to suffer from a zipper malfunction of sorts.

Pascal Bestebroer from OrangePixel, told Kotaku…

“The update was rejected by Apple because of the ‘violence’ in the screenshots (side note: Gunslugs 2 uses pixel-art, tiny 12×12 main characters and 1×1 blood pixels). “The idea behind it, from what I understand, is that even tho [sic] the app has a 12+ rating, they do need icons and screenshots and basically the store-page to be 4+ rated. So screenshots should not show anything that is below the 12+ rating, which is a bit hard to do for most action games.”

It’s kind of weird because if you take a look at a game like Gang Nations from Playdemic, you can clearly see on the iTunes page that guns are still very much allowed in the promo images.

Additionally, Madfinger Games’ Dead Trigger also still sports guns in the promo images on the iTunes app store page.

Then again, in the latter’s case the game hasn’t been updated since December, 2013. So maybe this new rule only applies to newer titles and “violent” games that have recently been updated. Although, that still wouldn’t explain Gang Nations since it was updated on February 10th, 2015. It also doesn’t make sense given that Bullet Rush also shows guns on the store page and hasn’t been required to censor out the weapons.

According to an updated post from Pocket Gamer, a few other developers have spoken out about the censorship on the iTunes app store, with a developer from PikPok saying…

“We had an App Preview for Into the Dead rejected because we were showing weapons firing (and you kinda can’t have an App Preview for that game without that).”

According to a spokesperson for Elektron, it was mentioned that…

“since the metadata [meaning screens, etc] is visible to all users on the App Store, this content must meet the 4+ [age] rating requirement, even when purchasing is restricted by a higher rating.”

Well there ya go… but that still doesn’t explain Gang Nations and Dead Trigger, or am I missing something? Is Apple practicing selective censorship to get other devs to line-up lock, step and sync or will they be retroactively having other devs update their profile pages on iTunes as well?

This isn’t surprising given that there were previous issues of tenuously regulated censorship when Papers, Please was briefly hit with the censorship hammer, as reported by Tech Raptor.

I guess it’s just something developers will have to be wary of when they submit games to be hosted on Apple’s digital software stage, which resides behind an iron curtain.