what is luck be a landlord?
It’s a video game where you use a slot machine to pay your landlord rent. So all the “gambling” is using fake in-game currency. What makes it more of a game is that you can choose upgrades/modifiers for the slot machine to adjust the odds for certain outcomes.
its the non casino themed gambling that should be banned. casinos are too boring for modern kids but all the real money transactions in games clearly are super appealing. I had casino video games as a kid and I don’t have a casino gambling problem at least. I gamble with whether to stay at my job or find a new one, or rent vs buy this or that regularly though. Or gambling over whether to work or spend money on school for a low chance of a higher paying job that didn’t cover the increased debt in 4 years and didn’t land me a new job of even approximately the same pay grade1. Actually I have won in casinos before but I’ve only ever lost non casino gambles.
“You kissed you.” -Vegas Stakes ending sequence as played by a group of dumb kids in the 90s, SNES
Best solution I could see to this type of censorship of apps would be to sell an APK of it on someplace like itch(dot)io or a different store of their choice if they already aren’t. Just give up and start pointing towards those types of places. Though, I would make a final update to those who bought the game on the play store to at least tell them what’s going on and direct them to wherever the app would be available. Even if they’re not updating the game, probably still something to at least consider.
Edit:
Looked up the itch page for it and top comment right now is pretty much saying they should either put the APK for sale either on itch or humble bumble, steam as a DLC if possible to do so, or am•zon’s app store. I personally think itch is the safest bet myself, but I’m also an idiot who doesn’t know what sites are better for that type of stuff.
So? What does it contain that Google might call gambling?
the game is a slot machine. It’s a purely aesthetic slot machine (zero ads, zero MTX, zero premium currency, zero paid DLC), but it turns out “does it look like casino gambling” is the concern, not “is it actually something that you can ruin your life over because it preys on gambling addiction”
It looks like the dev is just gonna sigh and accept the garbage “age rating” system, and let LBAL stay on the store as a “mature 18+ audiences only” app.
Looks like the LLM enshitification is coming to the Google Play store now
I don’t really know what you think LLMs has to do with this case, but just for reference - Google have been notorious in automated moderation on the Play Store since long before LLMs were a thing in general use, and they are also really bad when it comes to managing these processes once an automated moderation action has been made. Lots of devs get screwed this way.
