Welcome one and all, we managed to escape Faceboooook.
I know it's bad form to start in such a way but this is a bit of a rant. Very bad karma over there at faceboooook land. In just a few short weeks I've had:
<rant>
- Random Shop products disallowed because they "promote firearms or explosives" (they don't), then after review because they promote a downloadable game! (guilty as charged).
- their awful site redesign.
- My shop got deleted entirely, requiring me to set up a new "enhanced" shop and a new business account.
- I've had my public business documents links now hidden behind facebook account login, without warning. This has caused big issues with other partners trying to access said documents.
- Today I discovered I was locked out of all my running ads because my account was disabled due to "suspicious activity".
- All despite being a "trusted Oculus Start member" with a Rift and Go devkit and even an Oculus branded hoodie, which they sent to me from the USA, to my address! Now they claim they don't know who I am? Eeeesh!
- I had to send them my driving license to get my stuff unlocked, this was the last straw for me, I'm out!
- All this without warning and without being able to ACTUALLY TALK TO A HUMAN BEING.
To be honest, over the last year or so all the big tech platforms I deal with have driven me to the edge of dispair at one time or another, to some degree.
With amazon it was poor old Botty Bird getting rejected time and again and eventually I had to send them a legally signed letter stating I had the rights to publish it.
With Google, well where do i even start? I've already had all my ad revenue suddenly demonitized because of "potentially suspicious activity" and they even went out of their way to tell me that they couldn't possibly tell me what this activity was as this would tip off the hackers how to game the system! In other words, don't bother asking because we won't tell you, this is our get out of jail card catch all. The very latest being they've completely deleted my Space Invader 7 trial app without warning, seemingly because it dares have the same logo as the game it is a Trial for. This just happened to be on an update where I was promoting the Amazon Fire TV controller support. That's it, no letting me change anything, just deleted, start again, nothing I can do, no one I can talk to, no test of reasonableness.
And then there is dear old Microsoft. Dismissing Space Invader 7 for a full xbox release, out of hand, twice and now refusing to engage with me when i ask about their reporting statistics, telling me I get no page visitors, no stats, but that results in 1000s of downloads. So obviously a huge bug in their reporting numbers yet they just pretend it's not happening. Why Microsoft, why?
Just on a general point of rant, why is everything so.....shit these days? Everything is a scam, everyone has an angle. I can't even watch youtube without being bombarded with multiple ads and badly disguised product placement, sponsoring, patreon support begging. It's all so underhand, where is the advertising standards in all this? Urgggghhh I hate it all so much!
So here at VR game Studio I try to do things differently to everyone else. I try to make stand alone products without any subscription, spyware, malware, dodgy SDKs, selling user info, loot boxes, in app purchases, none of that, just an honest product for a fair price. If you like it then please just buy it and we are done. No doubt my idealism will need to be tempered with time but for goodness sake, it should not be like this.
I suppose that all this can be summed up that I, and I suppose many or even most of us now are being bullied by robots. And when I say bullied I mean it in the truest sense, "made to feel bad by an alogorithm or an AI". I'll be honest; when these things happen it ruins my day, puts me in a bad mood and winds me up no end. If this turns out to be truly the way of things then it is an obscene situation to have gotten into and it must be stopped eventually.
</rant>
Right so with that out of the way, as i was saying, welcome one and all to all things VR Game Studio!