My friends and I have been working on a WWII game. The game is not new at this point, and has been up for nearly 9 months. However, recently we decided to run ads/do a sponsorship. About 4-5 hours into this sponsorship, our game gets moderated. Here are the issues we are having and the topics I’d like to discuss here:
How does a developer approach the topic of WWII? We have no swastikas in our game, no armbands, no mention of the word Nazi, or anything of that sort. What are some ways that developers can avoid being moderated in this era of game? To be honest, it the whole moderation system seems arbitrary given the many other WWII games that are still up.
The moderation itself was, well, “weird”. It’s a group game (the group is owned by me), yet the moderation was sent to my friend, another developer in my group, instead of me. In addition to it being sent to him, the “asset” that was moderated was the entire game. Not an asset in the game, the “offensive item” listed was literally our entire game.
Now for the constructive part. How do we get our game back up? He and I both contacted appeals, him being the one that was warned and I as the owner of the game/group. We are yet to hear anything back, however it has only been a little over 24 hours. The main issue however is we are not even sure what to fix, and even if we were, my friend couldn’t as for some reason after the banning of the game he is unable to access it in studio.
Any support or help on any part of this topic would be appreciated, we worked countless hours on the game and would like to share it with our fellow history lovers.
Side note: The game is not “content deleted” yet, it is just listed as “under review”.
It seems that we don’t have enough information viewing everything superficially. You might consider reviewing your own content to see where things might have been flagged. Maybe an implicit thing?
We looked through the content, we could not find anything. We did not upload our own uniforms, we got them off catalog, and thats about the only thing I could think. The only other possibilities is we have classes and some of them have German names, for example one of them is called “stormtrooper”, a soldier with an assault rifle and extra grenades, and another “panzergrenadier”, given anti tank gear. Besides uniforms, and those names, I really could not think of anything else that would be moderated. We have a couple iron crosses in the game, maybe thats it? but again, we did not even upload those ourselves, they were found in toolbox. They also aren’t used with any red/white coloring, just the normal black iron cross. That is why we are stumped, we have no idea what it could be.
I appealed, and they told me it was for the Iron Cross in my game (which I got off the creator store), and that the game will stay moderated due to the “severity” of that being in my game, regardless of if its removed or not.
I’m here to share a similar situation. My game, Warfronts, was put under review in November with no chance of being reinstated for the time being due to having “Allied” and “Axis” teams. This has been the case for ages, yet other games set in the same era seem to be doing just fine and continue to attract many players.
It is very unfortunate that even games with millions of visits and large fanbases receive no leniency from the moderation team. I remember making all the required changes promptly and submitting an appeal, but so far, there have been no positive results—and none seem likely in the foreseeable future. This leaves dedicated developers with good intentions in a constant state of fear.
That state of fear is so real. Every time my page doesn’t load Im expecting to either have been banned or for my game to have been deleted lol. It feels so arbitrary and as if they will just remove it at any point.
