Addressing Customer Issues with Arcade on Amazon Store
CodeWizard
Inactive, Chef Emeritus Posts: 1,143
Hi all,
As many of you know, GameSalad has an ongoing relationship with Amazon to support our developer community and provide exclusive promotional opportunities. Our friends at Amazon have helped provide publishing incentives such as free PRO licenses, prizes and incentives for game jams while working with us to promote our developers and their games.
Some of these promotional opportunities recently involved publishing eligible GameSalad games to a GameSalad Arcade promotional channel on the Amazon store. Any of the games submitted during our recent game jams were part of this promotion. Many of the games on the GameSalad Arcade were also eligible. These games are free for Amazon users, and showcase what our community is doing with GameSalad. It’s a great opportunity to get exposure for GameSalad devs and show off their great work to a larger audience.
It turns out that we made a mistake in how we flagged eligible games in our database when we sent over a batch of files to Amazon. Some games that shouldn’t have been published were accidentally included. Yikes! It was never our intent to publish ineligible games and we’re sorry for anyone that was affected by this. We’re working with Amazon to take down any games that should not have been part of the promotion and they’ve offered to help expedite the process.
If you have a game that should not have been included in this promotion, please follow the instructions below to have your game removed.
Please accept our sincere apologies if you’ve been negatively affected by this mistake. We’ll get this resolved as soon as possible and will be extra diligent in the future to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Thanks!
Self Help Removal Instructions
In order to have your HTML5 apps removed from the Arcade channel on the Amazon store, please do the following:
- Visit the publishing portfolio page for your game and go to the Arcade/HTML5 configuration section. (If you have removed the game from your publishing portfolio, please send in a Support Request (http://support.gamesalad.com/#/help/website) and we will process the removal for you. For the field “Enter the URL address of the page” please enter the http://arcade.gamesalad.com page for your game.)
- Uncheck “Allow GameSalad to use my game for promotional purposes on third party sites and app stores.”
- As Amazon does not have an automated removal mechanism, it may take a little while to remove the games, though Amazon has agreed to help expedite the takedown process.
As an alternative to removal, you can create a “demo” version of your game for Arcade that points to your full game on Amazon. Let us know via support ticket when you have updated your game, and we will publish the update to Amazon.
Comments
@codewizard you'll have seen my concerns over in the other thread, that have gone unanswered by GameSalad. Any chance of someone from GS giving some input/response?
1) References keep being made to the GameSalad/Arcade channel on Amazon... but its not a channel, its just mass publishing apps, in an Android compatible format. Not a channel... this is misleading/confusing.
2) With regards to ok'ing apps on the Arcade for Promotional purposes. Can you confirm or deny whether GameSalad earned any money from the agreement with Amazon? If you did, then thats no longer promotional..its become a financial transaction, and not the same as being given permission for promotional purposes.
3) The Apps have been published in a shoddy way, with little to no quality control. The wrapper, for the HTML5 you've used doesn't run the games in the best way, with apps not shutting down or crashing etc. It seems like a rushed process that doesn't respect our work. I downloaded one of my games, only for it to install a completely different game. Theres even apps published through the process, with artwork stolen from well known, big name games from Rovio, Halfbrick and others... Is this considered a good way of promoting GameSalad or its users products?
4) How long are the apps planned to remain on Amazon in this format?
5) Are you just honouring the removal of apps that weren't in the Jams, or will you be removing apps from users that feel misled on the terms of use, and terminology regarding "promotional" and "channel" that were used to promote the Jams?
Totally agree with @Chunkypixels and looking forward to the questions being answered.
I feel like you sold us out for your own financial gain, we know it costs $200K a month to keep the lights on but this has done nothing but harm the reputation of GS and placed mistrust with your customers.
I still say you should of selected 50 good games and cleared it with the developers, slowed down and done it properly instead of panic and mass upload making loads of mistakes along the way as mentioned above and in the other thread.
The way this has been done feels sneaky and wrong and we had to find out from a previous GS developer who found 3 of his games uploaded.
Improvement is definitely needed in that area if the purpose is to be promotional channel for GameSalad.
It would seem extremely safe to assume that yes, they have earned money. At the very least they'd have subsidised the free pro months, or the $10 rewards etc. But just because GameSalad are being paid to promote, doesn't mean it's not promotional.
Definitely needs to be an actual person vetting submissions. (Which might have avoided this problem in the first place.)
I hope they do honour the removal of all requested apps (though if you won a prize, or got a month of pro, or got $10, that should of course be taken away again). I don't really think it was misleading. You may remember me raising concerns about the breadth of the T&C when the first jam was announced. They were pretty clear about their intentions. The only people with a real, legitimate cause of unhappiness here are those who had their non-Jam games published, when they didn't tick the agreement checkbox.
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We apologize if this was confusing. We’ve been using the word “channel” to describe a collection of content under one publisher title. We’ll try to be more clear in the future.
We have an agreement with Amazon that’s not specifically tied to any promotion that enables us to give a certain number of PRO licenses away in addition to prizes and other incentives. These games are for promotional use only, which we define as not being sold on the Amazon store and intended to drive awareness of GameSalad. We're also not legally allowed to discuss the specifics of our partner agreements.
This is our first attempt at publishing Arcade games on Amazon using their HTML5 wrapper technology. In our testing, we found them to perform well, but we’ll explore other solutions in the future that can improve performance. We’re not looking at individual games in our Arcade for copyright infringement, however we will promptly take down any games that we are notified of that appear to violate copyright.
We're planning on keeping the apps up for the foreseeable future.
We will take down any games requested by developers. We’ll honor any prizes or incentives given to developers who were unclear about the rules. Going forward we will do our best to better clarify the rules and terms of service to avoid any confusion.
@codewizard thanks for the response.
Your answers, and the way GameSalad are offering to remedy the situation have put my concerns to rest...
cheers
What happens to all the games that you published by mistake but the developer does not know about it. Are you just going to leave them there because they can't manually take them down? Not everyone reads the forums so you still are "Screwing" with many developers and you seem to "Don't even care".
This is so going in my blog.
Is this what everyone is suppose to enjoy? Pretty low of you to think this is a laughing matter.
Fortuna Infortuna Forti Una
deleted post
Bad wolf Guy makes a valid point and i too was wondering about all the developers that simply don't know they could have a free version of their game uploaded by GS along with a paid for version they uploaded.
I have done business with DBA for years, upstanding guys
I have done business with DBA for years, upstanding guys. DBA has also put out a number of successful games, I am not familiar with your work.
About being scammed, sounds like you bought something that was watermarked, if so that is fairly common.
@Walter01 first of all you shouldn't be slandering people or a company and second you have five posts here so we have pretty much an anonymous person slandering a well known and respected member here. Grow up man.
I have done business with GS for years, upstanding guys
@Walter01 Please address those complaints directly to DeepBlueApps.com rather than here.
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whatever, lol
just seems like a lot of unnecessary slander all around..
I liked your post before the edit. Although many would agree with you, he does have a legitimate complaint towards the gamesalad/amazon debacle.
Fortuna Infortuna Forti Una