This thinking seems about 3 years old to me. I do agree they have a different process for free vs paid, but the take-down of “free apps” has been ongoing. I’ve been following this on several open source projects and fascinated by the social evolution and the apathy toward it. Each year there seems an increased technical ability of asset/trademark/character name owners to feed into Google to trigger these claims. It defiantly seems to evolve over time.
Google’s search engine alone, imagine if you are trying to sell your car on eBay - if you add the latest Star Wars film language into your listing you are going to get more hits and views on your car and get more sales. There is a massive number of people laboring away to combat this kind of thing and protect the profits of the brands. It really does change over time, and “free” isn’t the protection it used to be.
That’s why Zork raised my eyebrows so much on this example. Because it’s iconic. Film companies, book authors, etc Yes, there are Zork books: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork_books
since zarf has chimed in challenging me on my suggestion that small authors would generally want promotion, now I feel nearly compelled to change my own screen shots. As he is such a powerhouse in this small community. The only “safe” thing is to author a story completely on your own and feature it - and not mention any established stories. As the community can be hostile and even file false claims against you if people are competitive (and dare I say that world commerce and politics has gone way far in that competitive direction listening to the news every day).
you could well be right. They’re definitely tightening everything up. Perhaps this Zork reference slipped through. Though it does mean the app could be pulled at any time. Which is not a nice position to be in for the developer.
no, it is not, and if you are at 5000 installs and suddenly it goes “big” and you have 100,000 - the popularity triggers scrutiny can get you pulled at the worst possible time. And competitors who see you have made it big and want to trigger false complaints against you, eliminate the competition (copy your app, or just don’t like your style and personality). On Android, it’s been small time for general-purpose IF apps - and the larger successes have not released general-purpose (loadable data-file) apps. Even the ratings system for age-appropriate is an issue -as people could load data-files that are for mature ages (or against political concerns, I’ve mentioned The Moon Watch and posted screen shots, which is a Russian story). I think it’s important a community sees common problems and not let greed or apathy keep good stories out of the hands of readers. I think creative fiction is important… ॐ
Follow-up to my “out on limb” asides: I wrote Emily Short and she replied - said it was fine to use her name and story screen shots in promoting my Android app (Thunderword). Part of why I felt this was true was her release of Counterfeit Monkey on github. An experienced authors knows that very few are going to bother to look for the source code - yet she still made the effort to open source it. I think software developers can know the same experience in regard to encouraging and testing each other’s apps (bug reports, even if mistakes), etc. The funding and copyright issue on the grass-roots level is entirely different than the cloud-level (Disney, etc).
Good news that you’ve settled any permission issues with TW screenshots.
I agree that there’s a problem with general purpose terp containers. I also feel your strategy of having another app acquire game assets on TW’s behalf sounds good until you get to the point where you will also have to write those other apps.
I do think that to kickstart interest in people writing TW companion apps, you will have to write a reference app and release something with it. Then you’re in the same boat with regard to material and copyright with this thing.
The deployment idea with Brahman is, i make a tool that takes a prebuilt Brahman .apk and substitutes a different game file, icon and other assets, then changes the product id and finally signs it. Then this becomes a new product.
Each such product then has it’s own fight and something with, say mature content can be rated as such.
It’s April 15 today, two months since last word - what’s gong on? The Android graveyard of IF multi-story apps I hope on Good Friday is looking better shortly
