I am usually not one for clickbait titles on articles, but I think this one is actually quite accurate. Bear with me and thou shall be rewarded! Hopefully. This article talks about some interesting developments and my general thoughts which somehow always turn into philosophical life lessons.
For some time now, Google has been steadily pushing people away from them. Really, it seems as if they’re sick of being so popular and having so many users. They want you all gone. They only want to keep the ones that make them the most one.
The First Sign
I noticed this for the first time when I got this email:
“Policy Change: If you don’t use your account (enough) for two years, it will be completely removed.”
I am sure many people reading this will also have a Gmail account and will also have received something like this.
I am actually fine with this. Any reasonable platform should clean up inactive accounts. The world doesn’t have infinite space, so keeping stuff around “forever”, even if unused, seems silly to me.
It’s especially silly how many websites literally cannot remove your account, even if you manually request it be wiped. I once wanted to clean up my internet presence. I noticed there were a couple hundred accounts saved in my browser and decided to delete them all.
What do you know? Half of them had no option to delete them. I even sent emails to beg them to remove my account, proving it was indeed mine. I either received the response of “we can’t remove it” or “we will not remove it, and we won’t tell you why”.
This change forced me to clean up my own act. Over the years, I’d assembled a weird cocktail of 5 different Gmail accounts. It was a mess and I wanted to reduce it to just two. This was a good signal to do so now, backing up/downloading anything of value off the other accounts before I might accidentally let them expire.
The Second Sign
Since quite some years ago (ugh I’m getting old) I’ve had games on the Play Store.
I am quite prolific, even back then. Despite never taking it very seriously, I managed to get a nice list of almost 15 mobile games on there.
I followed their rules. I filled in their endless surveys. I did nothing strange: these were very tiny, simple games without extra requirements.
At first, this was painful but doable. I knew a game would be completely submitted in an hour or so. I knew it would be accepted within a few days, get a few downloads, and that’s that.
Then they made it harder. They increased their requirements all the time. Whenever I received an email from Google about another “policy change”, which they always claim is supposedly for privacy somehow, I had a bad mood the rest of the day.
It meant more work for me. Update all the games again. Comply with another odd rule. Bump the SDK/Android Version/Whatever to a new version, wait for their terribly slow upload form, hope and pray it all went well. And the number of downloads on every game effectively became 0. When I looked for them, I sometimes couldn’t find them, suggesting it hid the games and only showed them at all when the algorithm thought it a good idea.
Once, two of my games were removed stating “copyright issues”. I had to prove to them that, yes, they used copyrighted material, WHICH WAS MINE. They somehow detected that parts of the game were also present online in other places, but failed the incredibly difficult task of seeing that the name + website associated with it were the same.
Then, my games website (Pandaqi.com), which stores all the useless “privacy policies” of the games, was down for two fucking days. The server it was on was hacked; all my websites were down. I scrambled to get it all cleaned, checked, safe, and online in 2 days.
What do you know? Their system detected the link didn’t work and it instantly, without hesitation, removed all my games. I sent them a message saying this had happened and the policies were back up. They refused to reinstate the games.
Why? Nobody knows. They wouldn’t say. They just linked to the list of “community guidelines”, which has over 100 bullet points and things to check. And I was sure I didn’t actually break any of them, that’s how simple and unchanging my games were, but they didn’t care.
With one last ditch attempt I procured a different device, opened up the game, updated to the latest version, janked out the Ads inside—which were Google’s own AdMob, by the way—and reuploaded my most successful game.
Denied again. No reason given, only the same link.
I gave up. This is only a tiny part of the story of my troubles with the Play Store. My games are gone, my developer account will expire, and I will never return there. (And I propose nobody ever uses Play Store / App Store again, but I realize that’s a big ask.)
The point here is that I am not alone. I follow several news channels and fora about game development, and since a year or two ago, they are flooded with these stories. People doing nothing wrong, people trying to publish a few fun mobile games they made, and just getting removed and banned for no reason. It just never ends. Seemingly every other day, another story like this, another one that makes me nod and say “yep, that’s what they do”, as the one writing the post slowly goes mad.
The clear pattern here is that Google just wants us to go away. They are practically the only source of mobile games on Android, and thus the largest source of mobile games and apps in general. And they are very clearly kicking out anyone who does not make them a ton of money. They’ll find bullshit reasons, or let AI do it for them, to remove anyone that doesn’t have a huge game that rakes in profit.
And, well, what can you do? You can’t even “follow their rules, play nice” and come back. Google decides they don’t want too many developers anymore, they don’t want too many accounts and too many apps, so they’re clearly running a clean-up operation.
The Third Sign
The flood of angry messages about Google’s conduct has since spread into other areas. It has infected YouTube as well, for example.
Multiple Youtubers have related a similar story. They might be huge, they might be actually profitable and a net positive for the website, they might have been a youtuber for 10 years, it doesn’t matter.
I’ll give you one such story.
- Somebody uploaded a new video. This person has been doing this for 6 years and is one of the larger gaming channels. He is a very nice and gentle person, he never swears, his content is family friendly.
- The video was flagged and demonitized. He received a warning about “extreme profanity” and a strike against his account. (Too many strikes and you’re out, as expected.)
- The video obviously contained no swearing at all. So he cleverly checked the automatic subtitles that YouTube generates, which always bleeps out swear words.
- He found three instances that were bleeped out. What did he say? He said the name of a city. Which, when pronounced, vaguely sounds like an English swear word.
- (This person mostly does civilization-type gameplay. As such, he’s constantly saying the names of ancient cities or regions or battles. The ones flagged as swear words were a mix of ancient ones and cities that still existed today. None of them were English in origin.)
- He pleaded the case, explaining the misunderstanding.
- He merely received the reply that “I’ve checked with the internal team and they confirm your demonitization was correct. It won’t change.”
- Including another link to the famous “community guidelines” of Google, which is a large pile of subtle rules and not helpful at all.
And that’s that! Nothing more to appeal. Nothing more to say.
They will not give any reason why. They will not change their mind in the face of evidence or arguments.
They hold all the power and will demonetize you. (Which doesn’t mean the video earns no profit, it means all the profit goes to them.) And they’ll threaten to remove your entire channel without hesitation or delay based on … nothing.
Why are they doing this?
- Most probably, they just let an AI/algorithm decide what should be banned or demonetized. Far faster and cheaper than having an actual process.
- They don’t want to reveal this nor waste time correcting its mistakes. So they’ll never actually change their mind or listen to your arguments.
- And they’ll never give the exact reason why you were punished.
- Because if they did, they would need to be correct.
- And you would be able to actually fix the issue and have them change their verdict.
- And all of this would mean spending a lot of human resources on lots of creators with relatively small channels and little profitability to them.
They just want them gone, it’s pretty obvious. The small creators, the ones barely giving them ad revenue, the barely used accounts, they’ll find reasons to just remove them all and reduce their load.
It has already been sending people away from YouTube in droves. For now, however, YouTube is still far too large to fail. They can do this, they can lose loads of channels, and still be absolutely fine. In fact, I think they might still be running a surplus: way more new channels are started than are ever closed or removed.
Why I’m passionate about this
I can’t remember the exact quote or where I read it, but it’s something like this.
It’s the height of sadism to punish people and never tell them why.
This isn’t about some video randomly being demonetized or some channels complaining about a copyright strike. This isn’t about me losing all my mobile games for bullshit reasons; that pain is in the past and I really don’t care anymore.
It’s about the how—which is about lacking the why.
Punishing people by taking away their money or even their life’s work is terrible enough as it is. Doing it while refusing to elaborate is just absolute evil torture.
This is unacceptable in real life, and everyone knows it. Or, at least, most people know it.
Unfortunately, there are still many parents who raise their kids like this. They’ll punish them and then stay silent about the why. They’ll punish their kids and then utter the nonsense argument of “I’m not telling you why; you need to figure it out yourself! Only then you’ll learn your lesson!”
No! Fucking no.
If you have to punish someone—which is debatable in any case—at least tell them exactly why and how the punishment was decided. Preferably, give them a chance to fix the issue.
It’s stupid however you look at it. The reason parents punish their kids, for example, is because their kids have certain issues (such as their behavior in certain instances) which they want fixed. But then they don’t actually give their kids a change to correct the issue! (By explaining exactly why they are punished and perhaps delaying or progressively scaling the punishment.)
Punishment without explanation or chance for improvement isn’t just torturous and inhuman. It’s going to achieve absolutely fuck-all in the grand scheme of things. The only reason I’d “support” punishment goes out the window and will never be reached this way.
So no, I don’t believe for a second that Google thinks this is actually a great system and the punishments keep away the naughty channels or the evil game developers. There is no logical basis for this and the statistics in practice also clear point the other way.
No, they just want you gone, and they want to waste as little effort as possible on you. They want the big guys and the big money-makers; everyone else is a number to them, and one they’d like to erase from their yearbooks as soon as possible.
Reading those famed “community guidelines”, I had to repeatedly remark how the major mobile games I know BREAK THEM! Think about the biggest mobile hits, the Clash of Clans and whatnot. They rake in millions of dollars a year. They also contain every possible dirty trick to children to spend money, watch ads, get addicted, accidentally press that credit card button, ruin their privacy. But Google turns a blind eye because of the money.
I, like many small developers, once had to fight to keep two of my games online because they said my “button for the Privacy Policy wasn’t big enough”. Even though it was a huge button at this point in the main menu. Special styling and all, to make it stand out.
For those of you who have played a big mobile game sufficiently often, I ask you: Where is its Privacy Policy button? :p
I don’t think this is an acceptable byproduct of Google being a large cooperation with lots of accounts. I don’t think this is an oddity or bureacratic issue we should just “accept” from our largest online platforms. Like how Facebook means “the internet” to some African countries, I can say that Google/YouTube are “the internet” for lots of people around the world. They are incredibly popular, incredibly influential, and incredibly monopolistic.
I think it’s evil to have this kind of system and should be stopped right now.
I can understand wanting to clean house and get rid of most accounts. But this is not the way to go, and people are noticing.
Conclusion
Google has enjoyed a pretty favorable spot for many years. Even with all the hatred against “big tech”, against Facebook, against privacy issues and all, Google has … held firm with ease?
Most people still primarily use Google services. They use their email, they use their search bar, it’s even a verb. (“Let me Google that for you.”) In the past, they’ve been quite positive about the platform. It provided good services for free/cheap, it was your gateway to the internet.
I am afraid that goodwill is turning around now. I am certainly not eager to do anything online that involves them in any way. Most people around me, or in my general area of work, feel the same.
They’re not waiting for Google to annoy them with bans, strikes, demonetization, and endless “policy issues” without explanation. They’re removing everything from Google’s servers, begging them to wipe it all (which Google probably does not do, let’s be honest), and setting up shop elsewhere.
I can understand why many choose to ignore the signs. Why many think it’s really not that bad. Or they say “Your house, your rules” to whatever YouTube demands or the App Store punishes.
I will just repeat the paraphrased quote from before.
It’s the height of sadism to punish people and never tell them why.
Anyone that creates and maintains a system like that, be it a large media platform or parents “teaching” their kids, should be avoided like the plague if you ask me.
I don’t know if Google will ever fall or lose its position of power. Sure, everything comes to an end at some point, but I am actually interested to see (for example) if Google will stay relevant my entire life. I am sure, though, that there are some kinks in the armor now. And that, if they continue this path and institute even more obvious measures to get rid of the people they don’t like, they are certainly digging their own grave.
For example, you can download all the PDFs for my print-n-play games from shared Google Drive links. I’ve used this system for years, which means that the number of folders/games/PDFs on there is massive. It’s fast, it’s accessible to all, it’s free, it’s trusted. I know many people use Google Drive for similar things.
What if they suddenly ban me tomorrow? What if their AI secretly scans my content (so much for privacy), randomly decides it’s against some guideline, and now I’ve lost all my online boardgames? (I obviously still have the games myself, but it would take days of painstaking work to recreate it all somewhere else, update links, etcetera.)
What if this causes my attached email account to be banned or restricted or whatever? I use that email for all my game work, which includes communication with people paying me to host my games on their website and other important messaging I can’t lose.
It’s idiotic. It seems far-fetched. But now I have no reason to think they won’t do that. And that they won’t ban me permanently from their services for nothing.
Because the things I just mentioned have happened to others, repeatedly. Banned from Google Drive after a “routine scan of their personal files”, which just should not be happening. Permanently banned from all Google services after supposedly breaking AdMob (their mobile ads service, the biggest in the world) regulations. Which they can do because AdMob requires personal information and payment information, so you’ll just never be able to use that information for any Google service again.
I am researching a different place to make my board games accessible as we speak :p
Those were my thoughts,
Tiamo